


the way fire holds

by theundiagnosable



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: (they do some murders and are friends and pine a bunch it's not deep), (yen is a witcher jaskier is a mage and geralt is a himbo), Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:28:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24756298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theundiagnosable/pseuds/theundiagnosable
Summary: “There’s a song there, somewhere, don’t you think?” Jaskier says. “‘A witcher, a sorcerer, and a human walk into a bar’…”
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 294
Kudos: 906





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> \- the backstory is i was thinking about how yennefer and jaskier are both operating at zero chill maximum drama at all times and then i was thinking about how gender informs fantasy fiction archetypes in the witcher and then i blacked out and wrote uhhhh thirty thousand words about it   
>  \- see end notes for warnings/maybe triggery things please   
>  \- eta: [someone made art inspired by this????](https://mersephesie.tumblr.com/post/627001166173175808/fate-swap-au-this-was-supposed-to-be-for-the) i have Feelings???

Yennefer isn’t particularly fond of Oxenfurt, even when it’s not the middle of the local Academy’s end of term festivities. Her medallion begins humming against her chest as soon as she enters the city and it doesn’t stop – students are superstitious types, and performers are worse. The whole place is laden down with amulets and charms and half-assed attempts at summoning muses. Harmless magics, but enough to interfere. Enough that she won’t get advance warning of anything actually dangerous.

Given that it is, in fact, the middle of the Oxenfurt Academy’s end of term festivities, the place is a fucking cesspool.

The streets are full, people either walking someplace to drink or drinking right where they stand. Whether because of the visible weapons on her person or the fact of her clothes ripped half to tatters and stained with blood, the crowds of revellers give Yennefer a wide berth as she makes her way past the colourful decorations and down the cobbled streets. The stones make her feet ache.

Music and light and raucous laughter are spilling out into the road as she approaches the first tavern she finds. The place is packed, though perhaps less so than the more fashionable establishments further into town and closer to the Academy itself. Yennefer adjusts her satchel on her shoulder, touches her ring to confirm that it and its magic are still intact before pushing the door open.

She’ll say this for the city of students and performers: they know how to let loose. Every inch of open space on the tavern floor is occupied by groups laughing or gambling or gossiping at tables littered with emptied pitchers and bottles. A few gaudily dressed young people are singing some drinking song, all but drowning out the music of a bard over in one corner with a lute – skillful, Yennefer notes absently, though, by the looks of things, being largely ignored by most of the other patrons.

Yennefer shoves through the crowd, not bothering with apologies, and seats herself at the bar, dropping her satchel at her feet with a thud.

“Ale,” she says, when the barkeep, a round-faced, weary-eyed man, finally looks her way. “And the biggest room and deepest bath you have.”

The barkeep scoffs. “Have you seen it out there? Rooms have been booked for weeks.” He doesn’t bother with an apology. Does start pouring her ale, though. One for two. As good as Yennefer was expecting, given her current state. Not the sort to have people falling over to give her what she asks.

It annoys her. It has always annoyed her. She stirs her drink idly with the tip of a finger, listening to the conversations closest to her. The nearest one is also the most obnoxious – a group of men, overgrown boys, really, is loudly laughing and talking over each other, though they fall quiet enough when one in particular speaks, evidently their leader. He’s thick-necked, thick-skulled too, if the sound of his loud braying is any indication. As he talks, he’s flicking at the hem of the dress of the red-haired girl wiping down the bar. She’s too young for him. Too young to be in a place like this. Skinny, looks hungry, which is to say poor, and deeply uncomfortable.

“I saw what it did to my professor’s horse,” Blockhead is saying, with the tone of one confident that he’s regaling a captive audience. “Tore out its rib cage and left it out in the field, you could hardly fucking recognize it.” He clasps a demanding hand on the young barmaid’s waist, tugging her in and ignoring her startled yelp. “Wyverns are nothing, if I’d have been there-”

“It would tear you to shreds,” Yennefer says, and it has the desired effect, because Blockhead stops his clueless bragging in favour of turning his attentions on her. Yennefer allows him to look his fill, feels his eyes lingering over the glimpses of her skin visible through her clawed-to-shreds clothes. He evidently finds her pleasant enough to look upon, because he angles his body towards her. The barmaid backs away, fast. Good.

“And you’d fare better, would you, lady?” He says it mockingly, as a dig, _lady_ , when it’s abundantly clear Yennefer is anything but.

Yennefer sips her drink, lets the taste linger on her tongue. Cheap. Watered down, probably. She should have held out for a nicer tavern. Maybe a nicer city. “Make me a bet,” she says.

Blockhead leans closer. “Excuse me?”

“Make me a bet that I can’t kill the wyvern,” Yennefer says. She keeps her voice neutral enough, lets him hear what he wants. “Your lodgings for the night, say.”

The man scoffs. He won’t turn down a challenge in front of his friends, certainly not a challenge from a woman. Yennefer knows the sort. “I’ll take your bet, if you’re stupid enough to try,” he says, then, obviously bolstered by the laughs of his friends, takes out a small iron key on a ribbon, the sort given by lodging houses, and twirls it on a finger, leaning closer so he’s looming over her. He smells of sweat.

“You’ll come back once you’ve realized you can’t get close to the thing,” he says, dropping his voice so his leer is practically audible. “You can warm my bed while I decide what I’ll take from you as my winn-”

Yennefer reaches down, pulls the wyvern’s severed head from her satchel, and drops it onto the bar in front of the man.

The resulting silence is resounding. Even the bard stops playing. A globule of the wyvern’s blood, mostly congealed by now, splatters onto the floor.

Yennefer enjoys making people look. She likes pulling the rug out from under their expectations, likes watching them perform the mental calculus of understanding that the power in the situation isn’t as firmly in their grip as they thought. That it – the power – is _hers_.

Blockhead finally properly looks at her beyond ‘pretty woman in scant clothing’. Yennefer knows he’s taking in the silvered sword strapped to her back, the medallion dangling around her neck, stamped with the emblem of the wolf, unmistakeable even in a place like this. Sees him trying to reconcile the contradiction.

“You’re a witcher,” he says, half a question, half an accusation. All disbelieving.

“Are you frightened of me?” Yennefer smiles with teeth bared, dodging the question and relishing the way half the men recoil. “My room key,” she says. “And your coin.”

“That wasn’t the bet-”

“And your coin, if you value having a cock that’s still attached to your body,” she snarls, cutting him off mid-sentence and glaring so he’s forced to hold her gaze, to look into her eyes and see not a trace of humanity there.

It’s enough to dispense with any lingering vestiges of bravado. Blockhead lays a half-full bag of coin in front of her, moving quick, like he’s afraid she might snap at him. Yennefer catches the key one-handed when he tosses it, then returns nonchalantly to her ale.

“Freak,” he throws out, spiteful, as he retreats, his friends following suit.

Freak with a real bed for the night.

The barkeep is staring at Yennefer as she drinks, not even pretending to be subtle. The music’s started up again, at least, the din of a dozen overlapping conversations once again filling the room.

“Women aren’t witchers,” the barkeep says, hanging back far behind his bar as though being either a woman or a witcher is contagious.

“No,” Yennefer agrees.

“What are you, then?”

“What a rude question,” she says, staring him down, and he lasts perhaps five seconds longer than Blockhead did, but he cowers too.

“We don’t want any trouble.”

“So don’t cause any,” Yennefer says, then tosses back what’s left of her drink, holds up her newly obtained room key. “Where is this place?”

“Down the street and further east, off the main square.”

“Good.” She nods toward the wyvern head, still sitting on the bar top and staring blankly at nothing. Ugly thing. Nearly caught her by surprise, she hadn’t even had time to take any of her potions. “Know anyone who’ll pay for that?”

“I- someone from the natural history school, probably.”

“Good,” Yennefer says again. “I’ll be back to collect whatever you sell it for, do try not to get me ripped off too badly.” If the barkeep intends to argue, she doesn’t intend to listen, just rises from her seat and locks eyes with the too-skinny barmaid from before, who’s still watching, wide-eyed.

Yennefer dumps half of Blockhead’s coin onto the bar and slides the pile to the girl. “You’re alright?” Yennefer asks her. Gentler than before, very intentionally.

The girl shrinks away, obviously terrified, without answering. She grabs the coin, though. Which, yeah, bloody typical. Yennefer refuses to allow herself to feel stung. Just leaves without wasting another word, gentle or otherwise, on either of them.

The street is littered with discarded streamers that Yennefer crushes underfoot as she walks, ignoring the groups of laughing, obviously inebriated humans that she passes. She wants a bath, something new to wear, a night with good food and a warm bed. She’s got enough coin for one of those things, maybe another if the take from the wyvern’s head is good, but then she’ll be out on the road again, and then- fuck, then she’ll have to do the whole thing again, right down to wandering into the next human settlement and being treated like dirt on their shoes until she scares them into being vaguely hospitable. Things never fucking change.

When everything changes, or starts to, it goes like this:

Her medallion is humming again. Or- it’s been humming all along, but she notices it again now, and then she notices the actual humming, the musical kind, from somewhere up above her head.

She hears him before she sees him, and, craning her neck to peer upwards, it takes her a moment to place him: it’s the bard from the tavern, sat three stories up on the edge of a balcony, his legs dangling over the side.

_Colourful_ is the first thing to come to mind when Yennefer properly pays attention to him for the first time, perched among fluttering multicoloured pennants in a bright blue doublet with stupidly puffed sleeves, and the second thing to come to mind is _loud_.

The bard is plucking out a tune on his lute, singing as Yennefer walks past. She doesn’t recognize the tune, but his lyrics are clearly audible: “ _Its head torn from its shoulders, the monstrous wyvern dies; and last it sees through show’rs of blood are the maiden’s violet eyes.”_

She hears herself in the final words, looks up and finds that the bard is already looking down. He grins when their eyes meet, obviously pleased to have caught her attention.

“I’ve yet to find a more powerful force than song,” he declares, as if performing poetry. “Maybe vanity, though they do go hand in hand, don’t they?” He strums on his lute, contemplative, or at least meant to look that way. “Show me the god or king who isn’t captivated by hearing themselves in lyrics and you’ll show me the most powerful being on the continent.”

Yennefer doesn’t drop his gaze, raising her voice so he’ll hear her from up on the third floor. “Do they teach you to ramble like a senile librarian at the bardic academy or were you just born annoying?”

“Ah, I see, you’re beautiful to make up for the personality and freaky eyes, good to know. Did you really kill that wyvern?”

A quick tongue, even for a bard. An idiotic one, too, if he was listening at the tavern and still has the audacity to speak to her like this.

“No, I just carry a severed reptile head because it matches my outfit, what do you think?”

“Interesting choice there, by the way, with the outfit,” the bard says, fluttering a hand down in her direction. “Very ‘feral vagrant on a violent bender’, an admirably bold look.”

“What’s your excuse, your mother dress you?” Yennefer retorts, and the bard _smiles_ , this genuinely delighted thing that occupies his whole face. Not how people usually respond to being insulted.

He swings his legs back and forth in the air. Keeps his eyes on her. “The innkeeper was right, you know,” he says. “Women aren’t witchers. I mean, clearly they are, since-” he gestures at her flippantly. “But I’ve always heard that they couldn’t make it through the mutations, physically or whatever, hence my inquiry. Academic curiosity, you get it.”

“Oh, is that what this is?” Yennefer asks, dry.

“Yes,” the bard nods, all earnest, big eyes peering down at her like an owl. “Purely academic. Incredibly- almost _too_ academic, really, I’ve been told.”

Yennefer scoffs. She’s humoured him enough. More than she would bother, normally. She stuffs her medallion under her shirt to avoid having to have the witcher conversation with anyone else before turning to leave, and makes it perhaps three steps before, impossibly, the bitchy bard is at her side.

“Buy you a drink?” he asks, strolling along in step next to her. “Maybe a hairbrush?”

Yennefer stares at him, then up at the now-empty balcony, then back at him. “How did you get down so fast?”

“How did you find a glamour charm that would work on a witcher?” the bard asks, and Yennefer has him pinned against the nearest wall, her sword at his throat, before the last word is properly out of his mouth.

No bard would be able to detect that she’s using a glamour. No bard in the world.

This bard doesn’t look panicked in the slightest, just nods down at her sword hand. “It’s the ring, isn’t it? Enchanted or cursed?”

The only person that calm with a blade at their throat is the kind of person for whom death isn’t a pressing concern. The kind of person that can sense the most powerful glamour charm outside of fucking Aretuza.

“You’re a mage,” Yennefer realizes, irritated that it took her so long to place him as the cause of her medallion acting up.

“I’m many things.” He gives a little bow, insofar as he’s able to, held at swordpoint against a brick wall. “Former minor nobility, current maestro of an impressive amount of musical instruments, incredibly generous lover, and, if reports can be believed, stunningly handsome sorcerer for, what, it’s got to be at least a few handfuls of centuries, by now.” He grins, rises up on his toes then back down. It’s a particularly boyish sort of gesture. “Jaskier.”

Yennefer doesn’t move. “I didn’t ask.”

“But you’re still talking to me, which means you find me a least half as interesting as I find you,” the bard – Jaskier – says cheerily. “Come on, at least- a quarter? A- what’s the next thing, an eighth? I do music and magic, not mathematics, I’m dogshit at numbers.”

Yennefer raises an eyebrow. Mages, in her experience, tend not to admit to being dogshit at anything. Mages also tend not to sit in university towns playing the lute to a disinterested crowd. He’s unusual.

She hasn’t come across anyone else non-human in ages.

It’s for some pathetic reason, probably, something like how sick she is of being alone, like how being spoken to like a person is a novelty, that she lowers her sword, just enough that Jaskier can breathe. Yennefer stays close and looks him up and down. He’s tall. Slightly adorable for her tastes, all wide blue eyes and long lashes, but his shirt is unbuttoned enough that she can see hair on his chest, and he is, on the whole, not unpleasing to look at. Nor is he displeased with being looked at, if the smile that appears on his face as he follows the path of Yennefer’s gaze is any indication.

He looks entirely the opposite of anything that even remotely belongs in proximity to the life of a witcher. _Good_ , Yennefer decides, and takes out her newly obtained room key. “Are your lodgings better than this place?” she asks, as a group of partiers staggers past, singing drunkenly and off-key.

Jaskier has the courtesy to pretend to look at the engraved key. “Shockingly so.” He doesn’t shrink from it when Yennefer meets his eyes.

“Fine,” she decides. “Buy me a drink.”

“Yes ma’am.” He’s smiling again – that fucking smile, it would be dangerous, if Yennefer wasn’t who she is – as he leans back against the wall, watching her sheath her sword. “So,” he says, conversational. “The glamour, witcher girl?”

Yennefer lets out a breath through her teeth. Doesn’t know what makes her give a real answer, but she does, “I’m not a witcher,” and turns to walk on, leaving it to Jaskier to follow or not.

He does.

\---

It’s at least half the truth.

She isn’t a witcher, at least not properly, and _that’s_ at least half by choice.

She doesn’t know what the fuck anyone was expecting when they brought her to Kaer Morhen as a little girl. That’s how she knows it’s bullshit, all the witcher sayings about being entirely different from human men, because only men could ever be so shockingly arrogant as to decide to give one more try to an experiment that, ‘til then, had been entirely and without exception fatal.

There were thirteen of them, girls, all put through the trials, and Yennefer cried for her mother just like the other twelve, then watched each of them die in agony and was nothing but envious of any of them.

She remembers: days or weeks in, half-delirious with fever and the overwhelming oppressiveness of her newly enhanced senses, dragging herself along the floor. The angle of her shoulder was wrong, her hair leached of all colour where it was falling into her face, and she could hear footsteps and breathing and loud, rough laughter from everywhere in the keep while she took a knife to both her wrists.

“No easy outs, girl,” Vesemir said, sat stone-faced by her bed when she woke healed and rested and hatefully alive, and Yennefer tried to strike him across the face – he dodged, easily, because she was slower, then – entirely furious, because death had been her last chance, it had to be better than what she had been molded into. She wanted it then, death, and even once that curdled into a knot of spite in her stomach and the desire for death turned into a desire for escape by other means, the wanting didn’t stop.

Hasn’t, yet.

She didn’t look back when she left the keep. She doesn’t know what the fuck she expected to do with all her wanting, but she was damn sure, even then, that whatever she’d do, it wouldn’t be following a fucking Path, camping in the back arse of nowhere to do the ascetic, self-depriving monster slaying martyr nonsense supposedly demanded of her by destiny.

Decades, it’s been, more seasons than she cares to count, and she’s no one’s martyr, and that’s as much as she can say for herself and all her wanting. She worked years to pay for her ring with its glamour charm, powerful enough to make her beautiful, to make her hair and face and body normal enough for people to look at her without either laughing or screaming, which was a marked improvement, which, in Yennefer’s opinion, says more about how abjectly garbage her life was before than about its quality now, because there’s only so much a pretty face can get you when you’re dirt poor and your only discernable skill is killing.

Her life, every choice that she makes, is a slap in the face of everything it means to be a witcher. That, she decides, is at least half of the reason she allows Jaskier to lead her further into the city, onto the grounds of the Academy, chattering all the while. Yennefer keeps one eye on him, half-prepared for it to be some sort of trap, because she wouldn’t put it past mages to attempt to catch the only female witcher and dissect her like a specimen, but no ambush comes.

They ascend the stairs in a drafty old tower, instructors’ quarters. Mostly deserted, by the sounds of it. Jaskier pushes open a humble wooden door, identical to the others in the hall, and gestures, polite, for her to enter. Yennefer’s medallion feels like a second heartbeat against her own, and she understands why as she steps through the doorway and into a beautiful, spatially impossible set of rooms.

Some of it, she knows, is illusory magic, the ceiling appearing as a clear, starry night, an ornately carved harp playing gently by itself over in a corner, but a lot of it – Yennefer reaches out to touch and confirm – is real. Spectacularly real, dishes of food and drink on every surface, parchment paper filled with scribbled music, a stack of obviously expensive clothes tossed haphazardly onto a tufted velvet armchair. Everything someone could want. Someone with an appreciation for the finer things.

She smooths a hand along the sleeve of a fine embroidered doublet, feels Jaskier watching her as she explores.

“Witchers are supposed to be unmoved by beauty,” he says, a question. His mattress creaks as he perches on the edge of his four-poster bed.

“I told you-”

“You aren’t one, yes, you said.”

“Interrupt me again and experience immortality without a tongue,” Yennefer snaps, and to his credit, Jaskier does as he’s told, shutting his mouth and making a perfunctory little gesture for her to speak.

Yennefer chooses the shirt with the nicest fabric. “Turn around.”

He does that too, spinning so his back is to her and crossing his legs in one fluid motion. Yennefer steps out of her ruined clothes – she still has blood under her nails, both human and wyvern, but that can’t be helped – and pulls the shirt over her head, watching him warily all the while. The fabric is soft against her skin.

“I am a witcher,” she says to Jaskier’s back, slowly. Not confiding. Something adjacent, maybe. “But I don’t… witcher.” She makes the word a verb, this time.

Jaskier tilts his head. Yennefer could reach out and touch his neck. “I didn’t think it was optional.”

“I made it optional.”

“What _do_ you do, then?”

Travel from place to place scrounging for scraps and inevitably end up having to kill monsters anyway to afford even those. “Whatever I want.”

“And what you want is…”

“Everything,” Yennefer says, curt; then, moving them to a safer subject as she rolls up her too-long sleeves, “Why are you here, pretending to be a bard?”

“Not pretending,” Jaskier corrects. Yennefer can see his jaw moving as he speaks, just the periphery of it. “You don’t witcher, I don’t sorcerer. No one else from Ban Ard sets foot here, because they’re all much too grandiose for human musicians, and no one listens to academics enough for them to be worth influencing, so I basically have the run of the place.”

He speaks in fucking circles. “Funny, you said all those words and none of them answered my question,” Yennefer says, attention piqued in spite of herself. The tone of his voice when he mentioned Ban Ard was nearly dismissive, nearly implying that his brothers with their almost-infinite power are the odd ones for not choosing to play the lute in a students’ tavern.

She can see the smile on Jaskier’s face in the lift of his cheeks. “If I may?” he asks, then, when Yennefer hums her assent, he turns around, rising in one fluid motion, making his way to the nearest table and beginning to pour two crystal glasses of a sweet-smelling amber liquid as he speaks.

“Presently, I’m in town to seek inspiration and to get married to a brilliant philosophy graduate,” he says, then makes a face, as if reconsidering. “Well, engaged. Well, I have to ask first, technically, and either get her family’s permission or convince her to attempt a daring and deeply sexy elopement, but-”

Yennefer thought sorcerers were supposed to be smart. “You can’t just fuck her?”

Jaskier actually looks mildly scandalized. “Can I just- does the concept of romance mean literally anything to you, witcher girl, who, by the way, just pointing out, still hasn’t told me her name, which by this point in our acquaintance is honestly kind of rude-”

“Romance,” Yennefer echoes, a question and a criticism in one. Neither seems to trouble Jaskier. She’s getting the impression that not much does.

“Yeah,” he says, readily enough. “Yeah, I’m madly and ardently in love with her, that’s the whole- was that not coming across?”

His heart rate is normal. No sweating, no shifty eyes, none of the signs of lying. He’s actually being earnest.

Yennefer accepts the drink he hands her. “You’re batshit insane,” she says, because if his willingness to invite a witcher to his rooms didn’t confirm it, his sincere belief in love has.

“I like you,” Jaskier declares, as if one thing has anything to do with another. Perhaps they do, for him.

“Confirming my point.”

“I saw you give that barmaid your coin back at the tavern,” Jaskier says, eyes on hers. “You’re nice.”

“You’re misguided.” Yennefer gives him her filthiest look. “I’m not _nice_.”

Jaskier just shrugs a shoulder, laying back on his bed, leaning against his fucking armada of plush pillows. “Kind, then.”

“Wrong again, and very confidently, congratulations,” Yennefer says, and Jaskier raises his glass to her before taking a drink. He makes no move to approach her or to beckon her closer, not even with her standing here in his rooms wearing one of his shirts and nothing else.

“You really did invite me here from academic curiosity,” Yennefer realizes, disbelieving.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we’d be fantastic together sexually, or my sexual fantastic-ness would elevate you by proxy, it just seems sort of in poor taste, doesn’t it, the night before I profess my love to another woman,” Jaskier rambles, then his eyes light up. It makes him look approximately sixteen. “Why, were you actually going to sleep with me?” 

“I briefly considered it,” Yennefer says.

“I’m honoured,” Jaskier says, and that’s earnest too, somehow, even though Yennefer’s quite certain that he has no trouble wooing people into his bed. “I wanted to talk to someone else like me.”

“I’m nothing like you,” Yennefer says, stiffly, but Jaskier isn’t swayed.

“Someone else not like everyone else, then,” he says. “You know?”

She does. The honesty is jarring, still. Immortal magic users aren’t supposed to be this… this trusting, she’s pretty sure.

“Move,” Yennefer orders, and Jaskier does, scooting to one side of the bed to make room for her to lie down, and she does. She has to bite back a moan as she all-but-sinks into the mattress, the furthest possible thing from her bedroll or lumpy beds in cheap inns. She _wants_ this.

“If you touch me-” she starts to threaten, habit, and Jaskier raises an eyebrow.

“What body part will you threaten to remove this time?”

“I don’t know, I usually go for something they’re proud of, but you don’t seem to have much worth pride,” Yennefer parries, sharp. “Hundreds of years, and this, this is what you settle on?” She gestures at him and Jaskier laughs with the air of one who knows fine well that any criticisms of his appearance are mostly bullshit. All pretty people are assholes, without exception.

“I’m not hundreds of years old,” he admits, not quite managing to sound guilty at the lie from earlier. “Sounds more impressive if I am, no one likes a youthful mage. I’m barely older than I look. How old are you?”

“Older than I look.”

“Is that why you changed your appearance?”

“Why do you care so much?”

“You aren’t supposed to be able to charm witchers,” Jaskier says, shrugging a shoulder. “You found a way. It’s interesting, objectively, don’t you think?” Then, needling again like he expects a different answer if he talks a hundred miles a minute, “I suppose there’s no point asking what you really look like.”

“None,” Yennefer says, because she’s enjoying being beautiful people trading somewhat barbed banter, and she doesn’t enjoy much; it would be a shame to ruin it by showing herself as a mutant made for death.

“Fair enough.” Jaskier changes tack cheerily, buoyantly. “Any preferred adjectives, for when I’m writing a song about you?”

“Fuck, you’re annoying.” Yennefer props herself up on an elbow so she’s peering down at him. “Are you good at it?”

“Songs?” Jaskier folds his arms behind his head. “I’m the best there is.”

“I haven’t heard of you.”

“You will,” he promises. The light in his eyes, sun-soft until this moment, looks, for the first time, like fire, a flustered kind. _Oh_ , she thinks, recognizing something in him for the first time. He is a thing that wants, as well. “Once I’ve written something wonderful, you will, it’s just- look, it’s a process, alright, and gods know I’ve got time.”

Yennefer snorts. “Maybe not, if you keep inviting deadly mutants into your bed.”

“Ah, you wouldn’t be deadly to a friend,” Jaskier says, somewhere between teasing and cosseting.

“We’re not friends,” Yennefer says, but that doesn’t deter him either.

“You’re right, I still don’t know your name,” Jaskier says, then, tossed out rapid-fire as though he means to trick her into the truth, “Marta? Natalya?”

Yennefer rolls her eyes. 

“Hm... Agatha?”

The fucker defies even eye rolling. ‘Fucking- Agatha, really?”

“I’ve met some lovely Agathas!” Jaskier protests, then, frowning, “Well, no, I haven’t, but, in theory, they exist somewhere, probably. Conceptually.” His tongue pokes out of the corner of his mouth as he flaps a hand about. “Conceptually… lovely… Agathas.”

Yennefer doesn’t realize she’s laughing until it’s too late to stop, and it takes her entirely by surprise, bursting out of her a harsh, unfamiliar thing that she stifles quickly. Not quickly enough – Jaskier is looking at her, beaming, and he looks pleased with himself, but there’s something else there too.

“What?” Yennefer asks.

“If I weren’t almost going to be a married man, I think I’d have just fallen in love with you,” Jaskier says, entirely unabashed, and then he waggles his eyebrows. “Too late for a rain check on the sex thing, I assume?”

“You’re preposterous,” she informs him.

“You’re terrifying,” he retorts, though he doesn’t sound particularly terrified, or even terrified at all as he yawns, stretching out like a cat. “Wake me when it’s bright enough that I can go propose without seeming insane, yeah?” He doesn’t wait for a yes before closing his eyes.

She could slit his fucking throat. Sorcerers aren’t immune to _that_ , she doesn’t think. Bards certainly aren’t.

Yennefer lays under the falsely starry sky, listens to the music of the enchanted harp in the corner, and watches Jaskier sleep. His chest rises and falls slowly, rhythmically. Yennefer reaches out with a finger, the hand without her ring, and touches the hollow at the base of his neck, feather-light, just because she can. He’s as stupid and idealistic as everyone else in this bloody city of students and performers, calling her kind, curling up next to her like they’re children together.

_Someone like me_ , he said.

Idiot.

Yennefer is no witcher, professionally, but she is physically: she moves silently around Jaskier’s rooms, taking as many of the expensive fabrics and dishes and pretty little baubles as she can carry, and then as much coin as she can fit into the pockets of the pants she takes as well, cinching them around her waist with a leather belt. It’s not personal – she’d almost pity the bard, if she was the sort of person who could still feel pity, but she’s not, and he’s unwittingly handed her an opportunity to change things for herself, to never have to rely on goading dickheads in taverns to giving her their rooms again, if she plays her cards right. No man, witcher or human, will dictate her path again. She takes opportunities when they come.

Yennefer tugs a velvety cloak around her shoulders to conceal her swords, lifts the hood and lets it cast a shadow over her face. She grasps her medallion, rubbing her thumb across the imprint of the wolf, feeling it humming under her touch, then tucks it under her shirt. Properly hidden, this time. Useful, but a relic.

She scrawls her name, _Yennefer of Vengerberg,_ in big, messy letters across one of Jaskier’s song sheets. Some pity left, then. Maybe only gloating. In any case-

She doesn’t look back at the sleeping sorcerer before she slips out the door.

\---

It takes the passing of eight summers after that one in Oxenfurt before their paths cross again, during which time Yennefer uses her newfound wealth to burn who she was to embers, to ash, to nothing but smoke; during which time she acquires a lucrative new way to pass her time, several minor wars and human squabbles are waged, and Cintra crowns its new king. He’s only a boy, young for the throne, but handsome. Kingly, whatever the fuck that means to people. More than willing, either himself or whatever administrative lackey handles such tasks, to request Yennefer’s attendance at a ball, and Cintran parties are fairly sparse for Yennefer’s tastes, but her latest quarry will be present, so she accepts the invitation.

No one even checks her for weapons when they announce her at the grand double doors. Times change. Human arrogance doesn’t.

She sweeps through the conversing clusters of courtiers, leaving and mostly ignoring a trail of polite nods and bows in her wake, a buzzing of whispered inquiries as to who she is. Those who notice her eyes murmur about the song – the fucking song, even here – unaware that she can hear every word they say, can smell the wine on their breath. They wouldn’t have looked at her twice, before she had a form-fitting black dress and her hair swept into a knot at the base of her neck and enough money for them to deem her worthy of being in their presence.

Yennefer declines the drinks and desserts offered on golden trays from circling servants, finds a convenient location on one side of the hall from which to search for Count Silas, the reason for her attendance tonight. The music is loud, a lively quartet up by the king’s table. Candles flicker from every sconce on the walls, lending the room a warm glow. It could be midnight or midmorning, and no one could know from looking. No sign of Silas, not for the length of a few songs, and then:

“Yennefer of Vengerberg,” says a voice from approaching from the side. “You finally brushed your hair.”

She knows that voice, even if it’s not singing out from a balcony or holding in a laugh in a luxurious bed.

“Jaskier.” Yennefer turns, her skirts rustling, to meet the sorcerer’s eyes. He’s dressed precisely as ridiculously as he was years ago in Oxenfurt, if more formally, in a shimmery gold doublet, his lute slung against his back. Still playing at barding, then. “You wrote a song about me.”

He doesn’t sound angry at her. Either doesn’t hold grudges or is smarter than to attempt one against her. “I did! Where did you hear it?”

“Where the fuck didn’t I?” Yennefer asks, because the damn song’s been sung in half the taverns on the continent, by now, everywhere she goes and stuck in her head at least once a month. Then, so Jaskier won’t look quite so smug, she adds, snippily, “ _The Violet-Eyed Maiden_ , really, that didn’t feel at all trite to you?”

“You try finding things to rhyme with ‘terrifying purple-eyed dominatrix’,” Jaskier retorts, swinging his lute to his chest so he can lean back against the wall next to her. “Did you like the part where the maiden steals my favourite shirt and all my coin and leaves before morning?”

“Seemed a tad derivative,” Yennefer says.

“Yeah, I’m fine, by the way, thanks for asking,” Jaskier quips, and they both open their mouths to speak at once, but are interrupted by the arrival of yet another minor noble attempting to ingratiate himself.

“Lady Yennefer!” He sinks into a deep bow that sets his tall collar wobbling precariously, which Yennefer reciprocates with another small nod. He claps Jaskier on the arm, jovial. “I see you’ve met our musical friend, is he not amusing?”

“Like the most obnoxious of jesters,” Yennefer says, glancing at Jaskier with a benevolent, sugary-sweet smile as he rolls his eyes. “Or a carnival clown, perhaps.”

“Ah, so you’re acquainted!”

“That’s a strong word for it,” Yennefer says, then, because she’s here for a reason and it certainly isn’t to be flattered by courtesans, “Have you seen the Count Silas, by any chance?”

“Bah, off somewhere,” the nobleman makes a face before lowering his voice with the tone of one indulging in a shared joke, “With a woman, probably.”

Shit.

He bows again as he leaves, and Yennefer snatches a golden goblet from a passing servant, downs the wine in one swig. When she finishes, Jaskier is staring at her expectantly.

“ _Lady Yennefer_ ,” he repeats, obviously incredulous. Probably fair – Yennefer now, red lips and a dress that glimmers in the candlelight, and Yennefer eight years ago, half-starved and beat to shit by a wyvern, resemble each other about as much as a toad and a daisy. “When did that happen?”

“Ask me to dance,” she orders, shoving her empty goblet at his chest.

“How archaic,” Jaskier says, very droll, but tosses the goblet over his shoulder and offers his hand, nearly genteel, if she didn’t know him better.

That’s the strange thing: the length of their previous acquaintance was confined to the space of an hour eight years ago, but Yennefer thinks that, _if I didn’t know him better_ , and feels certain that she does. Jaskier doesn’t seem the sort that makes himself difficult to know. In any case, eight years, in the span of either of their lifetimes, is trivial. Not enough time for him to learn any better comebacks, certainly.

She was right in her guess: she has a better view of the entrances and exits from the place she and Jaskier take up in the middle of the dancers. The current song is a lively one, and they fall easily into the steps, their hands pressed together. Jaskier maneuvers them so they’re directly adjacent to the band of minstrels, unable to be overheard, then says, “They don’t know you’re a witcher.”

“They don’t know you’re a sorcerer,” Yennefer retorts, then, “Witchers are not welcome in courtly society. Say nothing.”

“I wouldn’t,” Jaskier says, and Yennefer believes him, even as he talks on, “It’s a truly admirable feat of social climbing, for a formerly feral vagrant under a glamour charm.” He taps her ring, and Yennefer stiffens, but he doesn’t try to touch it again.

“And here you are still forcing people to endure your singing, some things never change, do they?” Yennefer says as she digs her nails into the gold brocade at Jaskier’s shoulder, only it backfires, because instead of being cowed into quiet, Jaskier stamps on her foot, the petty fucker, and then twirls her before she can retaliate.

When he spins her back in, he says, as though the interruption in the form of mild and mutual physical violence didn’t even happen, “You haven’t told me how you’re doing,”

“You haven’t asked.”

It makes him grin. “How are you, Yennefer?” Not ‘Lady’, not from him.

“Why should you care?”

“Friendship?”

Yennefer raises an eyebrow, switching hands as they turn, glancing around the room again as she does. “Do all of your friends rob you and not speak to you for eight years?”

“I don’t know, I’ve not got many,” Jaskier says, and the honesty in his voice, in his eyes, when she meets them, takes Yennefer aback. He’s got nice eyes. Blue like people think of the sky, like clouds don’t exist.

She composes herself. No one in here knows her enough to tell that she would have had to. “How’s your wife?” 

Jaskier looks confused. “My- ah.” He makes a face. “I showed up, I confessed my love through song – absolutely fucking beautiful ballad, by the way, not that it mattered – and she said she wanted someone to grow old with, which-” He gestures at his face, which hasn’t changed in the slightest in the near decade since Yennefer saw him last.

“Don’t feel too bad, it was probably just your personality,” Yennefer says.

Jaskier ignores the dig. “I was, of course, heartbroken,” he says. They touch hands, moving closer, then back, following the steps of the dance. He speaks easily, words flowing like a storyteller, even when she’s his only audience. “And _then_ I spent a very memorable year and a bit as the lover-slash-court composer of a beautifully muscular king regent, until he became horribly jealous all because I slept with his twin even though, really, it was a compliment, they were damn near identical; but he wouldn’t listen to reason and dispatched a horde of his men to smash my lute and murder me, hence me taking temporary shelter here.”

“Cintra doesn’t seem your style,” Yennefer observes, because it’s not hers, and they have similar tastes in some things, at least, judging by the undeniable fact of them being the best dressed in the room.

“Well, beggars, choosers, etcetera, you know,” Jaskier says, dismissive, but when their eyes meet, he hesitates, then adds, quieter, like an admission, “They have all these ideals about bravery and chivalry here. A young ruler advocating for positive change. It’s endearing.”

Still with the idealism, then. Still with the _humans_. No wonder he doesn’t have friends.

“Why are you here, if not for the society?”

Yennefer doesn’t have time to think of a clever lie with which to answer his question: she catches a glimpse over Jaskier’s shoulder of a slim, blonde man disappearing through an archway at the opposite end of the room. Count Silas. There’s a woman with him. Oh, Yennefer has been waiting for this.

“As lovely as this was,” she says, then, as the music crescendos, pulls her hand from Jaskier’s and begins to weave her way through the maze of dancers and diners. She makes a beeline for a door nearby, not the one Silas used – the corridors meet, she can be ready for him, head him off before he gets away.

The music immediately dims in volume when she pushes her way into the hall. She can hear Silas murmuring from a short distance, around a corner, fast approaching. Her heels echo as she strides along the mosaic tile, and then – she frowns – more footsteps sound from behind her.

“Yennefer,” Jaskier says. He followed. Of course he followed. “Would you- slow _down_ , whoever taught you how to dress didn’t teach you manners, leaving in the middle of a dance-” He’s loud, too loud in the emptiness, loud enough that he’ll scare Silas into taking a different route and ruin all of Yennefer’s careful planning.

Yennefer makes a split second decision; wheels around and drags Jaskier by his collar into a nearby alcove, tucked out of sight from the rest of the corridor. It’s small. No- it’s _tiny_ , a cramped space that means they wind up plastered against each other, Yennefer’s hand still clutching Jaskier’s collar, his chin brushing her forehead when he looks down to peer at her.

“Ah, are we circling back around to the sex thing?” Jaskier says, and his hand finds her hip. It’s warm between them; she can feel his heart racing at the proximity, though his voice stays light. “I won’t lie, I did allow myself to hope-”

Yennefer clasps a hand over his mouth, shushing him as the voices draw nearer. Jaskier’s grip tightens on her, and his eyes widen in surprise, but he doesn’t attempt to move or to speak, which Yennefer suspects might be a first, for him.

They stand, neither so much as exhaling, pressed together along the length of their bodies, as Count Silas passes. 

“Where- where’re we going?” A woman’s voice slurs. More of a girl, Yennefer suspects – she sounds just as young as the other ones who have visited the Count’s estates and mysteriously disappeared. It’s become something of a bogeyman for those working on his lands. Enough of one to have reached Yennefer, and concerning enough that she decided to intervene.

She enjoys it, the task she’s set herself – indulged herself with – these last few years. She’s good at hunting, at killing powerful, dangerous creatures outside the boundaries of normal accountability. The main difference is that the sadistic bastards she kills tend to have more valuables for her to take than the poor, stupid beasts the other witchers concern themselves with. A win-win, really.

She’s been waiting a month for this, for Silas, waiting for him to wind up somewhere easily accessible and plausibly deniable so she could strike. No point in waiting anymore. Yennefer pushes past Jaskier and emerges into the hall, deserted except for Silas and his latest victim.

“It’s in poor taste, don’t you think, raping young girls at such a nice banquet,” Yennefer says, and Silas spins around. The girl he’s half-carrying teeters unsteadily, staring at Yennefer as if through a haze of fog. Yennefer can smell the alcohol on her, tinged with something sickly sweet.

“Do I know you?” Silas snaps, and only belatedly bothers with a half-hearted denial, “I wasn’t-” They never do think they’re doing anything wrong. Morality doesn’t apply, when you’re untouchable.

“Save your breath,” Yennefer advises him, then reaches down and retrieves the polished knife that’s been strapped to her leg, concealed within the folds of her dress.

“Uh, hi, don’t mind me, just a tad confused, here,” Jaskier says, standing a few feet back, at Yennefer’s shoulder.

“Help the girl,” Yennefer orders him, then, while Jaskier stammers incredulously, she advances on Silas, baring her knife.

He puts up a fight, or tries to, shoving his intended victim roughly aside. It’s a fairly pathetic attempt, all things considered. This is the sixth Great Man that Yennefer has hunted down, and the thing about Great Men, she’s learned, is that they never expect her to be stronger than they are.

“Please,” Silas begs, all dignity forgotten, when she forces him to his knees. “Please, the girl is no one.”

Yennefer would tear him apart limb from limb, if the mess wouldn’t ruin her dress.

“You die more quickly than you deserve,” she informs him, then plunges her knife into his neck and twists, stepping nimbly out of the way as Silas’ insides make their way out.

Vengeance thoroughly dispensed with, Yennefer straightens, checks as she always does that her ring is still in place, then remembers to look for the Count’s intended victim. She finds the girl with Jaskier, who evidently caught her as she stumbled and is currently setting her down gently on the marble floor, his back to Yennefer. He’s only in his undershirt, a loose-fitting white thing, with his pretty golden doublet placed under the girl’s head as a pillow.

Yennefer leaves him to it, ignoring the flutter of something in her chest, and kneels next to the Count’s corpse. She takes the richly jeweled necklace from Silas’ neck, breaking the clasp as she yanks it off, and then removes each of his rings as well.

“-can’t imagine where he’s got off to, he’s supposed to deliver a toast.”

Yennefer looks up, tensing, as new voices sound from around the corner. They’re coming looking for the count sooner than she expected, and – she looks around sharply – she’s got nowhere to go, either into the alcove or back to the ballroom, where her entrance and its timing will surely be noted.

“Fuck,” she says. She’ll have to get a new glamour, once this face is wanted for murder, and she’s spent so long making Lady Yennefer of Vengerberg into someone respectable in these places only to have to relive a thousand little humiliations to re-establish some new identity-

There’s a whooshing sound from behind her, like a rush of wind or waves crashing into the shore. When Yennefer turns, it’s to see Jaskier on his feet, arms outstretched and brow furrowed with effort, in front of the whirling portal open in midair.

“Walk you out?” he offers, glancing over his shoulder at her, and Yennefer doesn’t hesitate – angry courtiers or a surprisingly not-useless bard, she knows which she’ll choose – before diving through the portal, Jaskier sprinting after her.

They tumble out inelegantly, and the cold is immediate and shocking. For one wild moment, Yennefer’s certain that Jaskier has transported them onto a damned glacier, but then her mind catches up to her senses and she puts the picture of their surroundings together a fragment at a time. The sound of burbling water, of crickets; the stars above filtered by the canopies of trees; the wind cold against damp skin.

A brook. Jaskier’s landed them in the middle of a brook in the middle of a forest in the middle of gods know where.

The water is shallow, at least. Still enough to soak their fine clothes right through. So much for ruining her dress, Yennefer thinks as she struggles to her feet, blinking in the dim moonlight, startling even to her eyes after the candle-laden brightness of the hall.

“Anywhere in the world, and you pick here?” she asks drily, glancing over at Jaskier, who makes a rude gesture at her as he flicks his sodden hair out of his face. He looks ridiculous. Mostly ridiculous. Partially- his wet shirt is clinging to his torso, gone nearly transparent with water, providing a fairly scandalous view of, uh, everything.

Yennefer catches her breath. It takes more effort than it should. She’s known that, for all his barding bullshit, Jaskier is a sorcerer, but to _see_ it. He was powerful. He was _strong_. He-

Is currently staring at her, eyes bright, and Yennefer remembers, nice body or not, what an annoying brat he is. “I was right,” Jaskier says. “About you being kind.”

“You’re the only person delusional enough to watch me murder someone and say that,” Yennefer informs him, flicking the blood and water off of her knife before sheathing it. “Seriously, you’re fucked up.”

“Yeah,” Jaskier agrees readily – ridiculously – and Yennefer wrings water out of her skirts, trying to lighten them so she can walk without being dragged down, but Jaskier isn’t done. “This is what you do, when you travel, instead of witchering?” he asks. “Kill bad guys?”

_Bad guys_ , like she’s a character in a fairy story. She holds up Count Silas’ necklace, each gem worth as much as a year’s worth of typical witcher’s contracts. “I take what I want.”

“Do you take what you want from non-bad guys?” Jaskier asks, quick, and Yennefer glares, because she can’t refute that and now he’s going to think that she’s soft, doing this from the kindness of her heart or whatever the fuck. Indeed, he looks thoroughly pleased at having his point proven. “It’s quite heroic, really, isn’t it?”

Yennefer makes for the shore. “No.”

“Could be, with some narrative tidying,” Jaskier says, undeterred, dumping water out of his lute while he follows, his voice taking on the dreamy quality it does when he’s romanticizing. “The violet-eyed maiden, travelling the continent, avenging those who can’t avenge themselves-”

“I expect royalties, if you make this a song,” Yennefer grumbles, finally getting a foothold on the muddy, blissfully solid ground.

Jaskier scurries up the bank with her, and his legs are longer, letting him get in front of her so she can see his stupid, eager puppy dog eyes. “Can I come with you?”

He can’t be serious. “I don’t need your help,” Yennefer says, and Jaskier shakes his head, once, without dropping her gaze.

“That’s not what I asked.” He offers a hand to help her out of the mud and onto the grass. Yennefer stares, but he doesn’t withdraw it.

He’s had eight years to think better of her, and hasn’t, yet. Yennefer has never had a companion on her travels, before. Certainly never a magical, singing one. And- and he _was_ useful, back there. And-

And she likes him. Is entertained by him, at least, even in spite of herself.

_Academic curiosity_ , she thinks, and it sounds like an excuse to her, even then, but she takes Jaskier’s hand. If he notices the matching scars on her wrist, he doesn’t comment, just pulls her up so they’re standing level.

“Yennefer of Vengerberg,” he announces, grandly, meeting her eyes like they’re co-conspirators. “I think destiny has brought us together for something wonderful.”

“Destiny doesn’t exist,” Yennefer says, then takes her hand from the warmth of his and shoves at his chest, gently enough that he stumbles instead of falling flat. “Get moving.”

And they do, and somewhere, a century away, destiny laughs.

\---

Jaskier, as a travelling companion, is largely the same as he was as a bard perched on a balcony or as a sorcerer in a stream, which is to say: deeply fucking obnoxious.

“ _When a humble bard_ ,” he sings out, keeping a leisurely pace at Yennefer’s side. “ _Graced a ride along with Yen- with the_ \- ah, bollocks, it doesn’t scan, does it?”

“The tune’s shit anyways,” Yennefer agrees, and the not-song goes into the scrap pile with the rest of Jaskier’s rejects, not that it matters, but he just starts on a new one, and that’s the first thing that Yennefer learns about him, is that he doesn’t shut up. He’s always talking, and if he’s not talking, he’s singing, and if by some kind bent of the gods he decides to rest his voice, his lutestrings fill the silence.

It’s not… unamusing. Yennefer has never much enjoyed being alone with her thoughts.

She learns, as they traverse the continent, that Jaskier has a healthy appreciation for violence, in an aesthetic sort of way, and learns that she herself finds it surprisingly enjoyable to finish dispatching someone terrible and have Jaskier watching from the best vantage point, already putting her work to song. She also learns – only reluctantly, after the third time Jaskier helps her escape via portal – that it can be occasionally helpful to have a mage as her travelling companion, even if said mage stubbornly insists upon performing at every establishment they pass. It’s like he blooms every time he’s got all the attention, singing out sweetly and making humans laugh or cry or dance with his music, which Yennefer suspects is laced with some sort of magic, though Jaskier never confirms it.

It becomes a routine, or as much of a routine as is feasible with their lifestyle. They take whatever valuables they can from the dead person’s house or carriage, then make their way to a prudently distant village where Jaskier always responds with unflagging enthusiasm to the task of establishing a backstory.

“My sister and I,” he declares to one particularly stodgy merchant, “hear that you’re in the market for engraved dragon teeth, and coincidence of coincidences, we happen to have a dozen of them.”

The merchant looks between them, skeptical. “That’s your sister?”

“His twin, actually,” Yennefer lies, straight-faced.

“Mother always said I was the pretty one,” Jaskier pipes up, then has to spend a good ten minutes doubled over and gasping when Yennefer elbows him in the gut, only to choke out, “Worth it.”

Their dragon teeth, courtesy of an unfortunately handsy landlord, buy them nearly a full month at the nicest inn in town, and provisions for when they set out again. They travel together, and Jaskier pesters Yennefer with questions – “Can you really see in the dark?” and “Is it true that witchers used to feed on monster flesh?” – or they travel separately and Yennefer braces herself for what she’ll hear when they reunite, because it’s always the same.

Jaskier, she learns, and learns, and learns again, is a _romantic_.

“I’m in love,” he sighs, inevitably, then runs off to fuck or get fucked or propose again or whatever it is he wants from humans, inevitably to slink back a day or a month or a year later like a scolded child with some new tale of heartbreak.

“You think with your dick, that’s your problem,” Yennefer informs him, one of the times he returns, as sympathetic as she’s willing to be. His unfathomable obsession with humans, with singing to them and with loving them, is his own fault.

“With my _heart_ , Yen,” Jaskier moans, oh-so-pathetically, and Yennefer shoves him off, biting back a begrudging smile, when he drops his head onto her shoulder.

That’s another thing he does, is make himself quickly and cluelessly comfortable in her space. He’s the most easily _physical_ person that Yennefer has ever encountered, touching without a second thought, without, she realizes, any sexual or overly forward intent.

He’s given up on trying to bed her since their first two encounters. Has given up even on _wanting_ to, Yennefer thinks, which is vaguely insulting but mostly just confusing. She knows she’s not particularly pleasant to be around, nor does she try to be; knows that her body and her looks, with the help of her glamour charm and the luxuries of having coin, are her main points of attraction, of getting men to do what she wants. If Jaskier has decided against wanting those, Yennefer doesn’t know what the fuck is in it for him, especially now he’s got multiple popular songs, certainly a sufficient repertoire if he insists on making a living as a bard instead of using his magic.

“Haven’t you got enough songwriting material by now?” she asks, casual so as not to betray her genuine curiosity, one spring night when they’re waiting in a garden for an audience with a queen.

“Shove off, people love my Violet Eyed Maiden ballads, I need to give them what they want,” Jaskier says, and that’s that. Yennefer supposes- it’s not as though he’s got limited amounts of time to work with.

For all that he talks ceaselessly, Jaskier provides very little actual information about himself. It takes Yennefer pulling at the thread of him over years and years for her to drag out, three years into their acquaintanceship, that the name he was born with was Julian, and then another year and a half to learn that he is technically – or was, technically, when he was mortal – a viscount.

They’re both tipsy, one night in Novigrad, when Jaskier lets slip that he spent his childhood and youth in religious schooling, the kind favoured by nobility. “Until I was seventeen, surrounded by other rich brats, doesn’t that just explain everything about me?”

“Most things,” Yennefer agrees. She could have guessed that Jaskier is educated. It’s in his voice, the hallmark of noble schooling, that expectation of being listened to, the confidence that his words are worthy of it.

“Yeah, I bet.” He sighs, and Yennefer thinks it drunken nostalgia, until he says, reflective, “Gods, they’d beat the absolute shit out of me. Madame Xenia especially, the old-” He spirals off into a chain of colourful invectives, all the more colourful for how much he’s had to drink.

Yennefer frowns, taken aback. “They would beat you?”

“Oh, yeah, for loads of things.” Jaskier counts on his fingers, “Composing rhymes about teachers, kissing boys, magically making the whole place burst into song at assembly once. That last one got me sold to Ban Ard, though, so, worked out alright, didn’t it.” His voice is as flippant as ever. Deliberately so, Yennefer thinks.

And it’s strange: she knows herself, can disentangle, if she tries hard, the pieces of her personality that have always been there from the ones that are the product of a violent upbringing. She didn’t expect that to be an exercise Jaskier had to partake in, him with his sunny disposition and stubborn insistence on loving the world. Not the kind of person to know what it is to hurt.

“Are any of them still alive?” Yennefer asks, quietly. “The people who beat you?”

Jaskier shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, then, quieter than before, but with a raised chin, his eyes suddenly entirely clear, “I’m never going back there.”

_Someone like me_ , he called Yennefer, once, and Yennefer dismissed it as nonsense, but now she thinks: maybe.

He falls asleep curled against her, snoring softly, and Yennefer lays the back of her hand against the musculature of his neck, feels the blood thumping there, chanting along, _maybe, maybe, maybe_.

They travel throughout Redania – shithole – then through Aedirn – less of a shithole, but still, on the whole, a shithole – and stumble across a cult with stupid ideas about sacrificing babies for eternal youth, which, Yennefer can attest, is not nearly as enjoyable as it’s cracked up to be.

She scoops up the infant from its place on the makeshift altar. It’s so small. Smaller than makes sense for a living thing to be, just utterly vulnerable.

“Don’t be frightened,” she murmurs to it, and it leans against the warmth of her chest, implicitly trusting. Yennefer considers calling it ‘darling’, just to hear how the word sounds on her tongue, ‘darling’, to see if it would burn her like silver on a devil.

“Hey!”

The moment shatters as the cultists burst into the cave.

“They’re back early,” Jaskier says, taking a step back, and Yennefer holds out the child to him.

“Take it.”

Jaskier backs away, eyes bulging out. “How in the seventh circle of hell am I supposed to know how to hold a-”

“Jaskier!” The cultist at the head of the group charges, dagger drawn, and Yennefer all-but-tosses the baby at Jaskier, barely manages to retrieve her sword in time to shield the both of them from a blow.

It’s a more challenging fight than usual, for her. Partially because belief in a death cult means that the cultists strike at her with reckless abandon and no regard for their own lives. Partially because the whole time, Yennefer has to keep them away from Jaskier and the infant, and that, Jaskier attempting to hold a child, is a disaster in its own right. She’s never seen him so visibly unsettled: he’s holding the baby as though it’s explosive, frantically humming a lullaby, which is a deeply incongruous and mildly creepy backing track for a brawl.

“ _Hush little baby, stay in bed,_ ” he sings, appearing for once as the young man he technically still is. “ _If Yen fucks up we’ll both be dead-_ Melitele’s- would you _watch_ it!” he snaps, flicking a hand at a stray cultist, who screams as his head explodes. Yennefer kicks the corpse out of the way and spares a moment to give Jaskier a look.

“Don’t traumatize the child with your songs.”

“Oh, _I’m_ going to traumatize the thing, says the woman who’s just run five men through with her sword, sure, Yennefer.”

Yennefer runs another man through, just to be petty.

She fights back a twinge of melancholy as she hands the infant back to its mother – _his_ mother, it’s a boy, which means he’ll be safe and loved and mostly the master of his own fate – none the worse for wear, possible trauma aside.

“You,” the mother gasps, when she meets Yennefer’s eyes. “You’re the woman from the song. I never- _thank you_ , Lady.”

Yennefer freezes, stiff, when the woman hugs her, though Jaskier clasps her hands warmly when she turns her gratitude on him.

“It was our very great pleasure, ma’am,” he says, still glowing at his song being recognized. He’ll be unbearably cocky for months.

The discomfort lingers with Yennefer, long after the hug and the town and the mocking Jaskier for being bad with children fade. The way that the woman knew her, or thought she did- Jaskier’s songs paint her as a noble hero, and, fine, Yennefer can understand the temptation to believe that in a cruel, generally shitty world, someone is selflessly protecting you, but this isn’t that. Wasn’t. Saving the child was just as mercenary as the rest of the work she does. The baby’s parents are wealthy merchants, and she and Jaskier left with two fine horses and thick, fur-lined cloaks for the coming winter. It’s _exchange_ , risk for reward.

Yennefer makes her next two kills bloodier than before. Messy enough to give the people who stumble upon the corpses nightmares. Jaskier wants to craft her a reputation, fine, but she’s no hero, no martyr, and she won’t be the one giving people that impression.

\---

They stay awhile in a pretty village off the coast, taking advantage of the rest while the local seamstress works on updating their wardrobes. Their last job yielded enough precious gems to buy them the nicest rooms at the local inn, and treatment like kings besides.

Yennefer sips her drink, looking around contentedly. Jaskier is away at the other end of the main room, flirting with both a woman and her husband. Never a good idea: three is fun, but always more complicated than two, and usually not worth the trouble. He’ll be moping back to Yennefer’s rooms with a freshly broken heart by mid-week. For her part, Yennefer is considering indulging the woman batting her eyelashes at her from a nearby table – it’s been a while, and the woman certainly looks eager – when her train of thought is interrupted by heavy footsteps.

You become familiar with the distinctive sound of someone’s steps, when you grow up with them.

Eskel smells like his campfire, sooty and warm, when he approaches Yennefer’s table. “Yenna,” he says. No uncertainty in his voice, though he hasn’t seen her with this face or body, hasn’t seen her at all in decades.

Yennefer’s initial reaction is to be pleased to see him, and then to feel vaguely sick, which isn’t his fault as much as it’s the fault of everything associated with him. No one has called her Yenna since she left. “Did you get uglier?” she asks, instead of saying any of that, and Eskel scoffs.

“You didn’t,” he says, and musses her hair as he sits across from her. He looks pointedly at her dress – it’s black and purple and velvety, a silly, luxurious thing, she’s quite fond of it – and raises his eyebrows.

“I can give you the name of the seamstress if you’d like, I’m sure she has enough fabric to make one in your size,” Yennefer says, lightly, because she was here first, and if he intends to judge her it’s best he realizes fast just how very much she doesn’t give a shit. “Shall I have them bring you a drink?”

Eskel takes his time to look at the general finery around them, then back at her, and his gaze only softens marginally. “This isn’t what we do.”

“We,” Yennefer repeats, icily.

“Yes, _we_ , your family.” 

“I have no family,” she speaks over him, harshly, making her words cutting, before he can go on. “That possibility was taken from me.” She stares him down across the table, forces herself to stay composed, to choke down the instinct to lash out. The sick feeling is back. This village is out of the way, no monsters to attract a witcher. “Us both being here isn’t a coincidence, is it.”

Eskel sighs. Reproachful, as if he didn’t endure the same cruelties as her, at least some of them. “You haven’t wintered with us in years, you didn’t leave much choice.”

Yennefer digs her nails into her palm. “Say what you came to say, Eskel.”

To his credit, at least, he doesn’t bother trying to bullshit her. “You’re attracting attention.”

Good. “Anyone who knows I was a witcher is dead.”

“They’ll figure it out,” Eskel says, then, catching up to the past tense, “Was?”

Yennefer raises her chin, defiant, letting him know that she didn’t misspeak. Eskel narrows his eyes, lowering his voice to speak urgently. “We aren’t vigilantes.”

“Ooh, a four syllable word, was that hard for you?”

He doesn’t take the bait. “Careful, Yenna,” he says, then repeats, slow, like she’s being unreasonable, “This isn’t what we do. We kill monsters.”

“I am killing monsters,” Yennefer snaps, and doesn’t mean to raise her voice or to stand up from her seat, but she does both, picking up speed, “I am, and it turns out that when the monsters are rich human dickheads, it pays better than doing pest control for peasants and hoping for something lucky from the fucking law of surprise.”

Eskel stands too, immediately towering over her. “We can’t shield you if you turn your back on the only reason people tolerate us,” he says, and if Yennefer hadn’t known him all her life, it would sound like a threat, but from him, she knows it’s a plea. “Don’t make them hate us more than they already do.”

“ _I_ don’t make people do things,” Yennefer says, pulling herself up to her full height, still barely up to his shoulder, and Eskel makes a sound of frustration.

“I’m not the one who made you anything,” he says, and Yennefer stiffens as he claps his hands on her shoulders. “What do you think will happen if they realize a witcher is killing humans? Your selfishness is going to fuck us all over, Yennefer, think of someone other than yourself-”

“Why should I?”

“Yen-”

“Yen?”

She and Eskel both draw back, just slightly, as Jaskier appears and, without waiting for an answer, plants himself in between them.

“Care to make an introduction?” He’s smiling, chipper as ever, but there’s something about him, a subtle change of posture, and Yennefer sees the side that he rarely shows, the Jaskier that is steeped in ancient magics and more raw power than most men could dream of. For all he hangs about with a lute and avoids the all-knowing air of superiority that most mages have, he is not, Yennefer realizes, someone to be trifled with, and she watches Eskel reach the same conclusion and stand straighter as well.

“Now you’re paying sorcerers to bodyguard you?” he asks, dry, peering at her over Jaskier’s shoulder.

“You’re joking, some bodyguards are getting paid?” Jaskier asks, all exaggerated, wide-eyed astonishment before he starts rambling to Yennefer, “We really need to discuss a new contract for me, it’s a competitive job market, you know.” He looks at Eskel innocently. “Are you hiring? My services have been overwhelmingly positively reviewed.”

Even at his most frustrated, Eskel’s words to Yennefer are softened with the familiarity of childhood. Jaskier receives no such consideration. “Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, mage,” he growls, low and fierce, and Jaskier _grins_ , doesn’t even flinch.

“Ooh, you’re quite scary too, but I think she’s _just_ about got you beat.”

There’s one infinitely fraught moment where Yennefer is convinced that she’s going to have to pull them off of each other and they’ll all be kicked out for stirring up shit before she even gets to finish her drink, but Eskel decides against it – fighting an interfering bard isn’t on the bloody Path, probably, Yennefer thinks bitterly – and takes a step back.

He meets her eyes. Looks pitying rather than angry, imploring. “Listen to what I said.” He doesn’t call her a freak as he leaves. He may as well.

Jaskier gives a jaunty wave, waggling his fingers. “Funny, I thought I was the one with shit taste in friends,” he says, and his voice is cheery as ever, but he doesn’t stop watching Eskel head for the door, his shoulders still tensed.

“He wouldn’t ever touch me,” Yennefer says, still behind him. Still watching as well. “You, he’d kill in a second.”

“Nah, you wouldn’t let him,” Jaskier says, flippant, then, significantly less flippant, “Are you alright?”

Yennefer presses a hand to her chest, her medallion buzzing the way it does whenever Jaskier is especially near. Hidden. Always hidden. She’s somewhere between embarrassed at him thinking that she needs to be coddled and furious at herself for feeling- what, grateful? Relieved, when he appeared. Some utter horseshit like that. “I don’t need you condescending to protect me like a big brave man,” she says, mean on purpose.

“Really?” Jaskier snaps right back. “That’s so funny, I’ve been operating this entire time under the assumption that you were a scared damsel, I’ll just be going, then.” He half-turns his head, just enough that Yennefer can meet his eye, just peripherally. “Friends protect each other, tough shit.”

Yennefer bites her lip, swallows the retort that is her instinct, and finds that her mouth feels dry.

She is not a thing that needs protecting.

No one has ever bothered.

_Friends_ , Jaskier said. He didn’t even hesitate before putting himself between her and what he thought was danger.

“Idiot,” Yennefer grits out, suddenly overwhelmed.

“Stubborn wretch,” Jaskier counters.

Yennefer leans her head against his back, closes her eyes in the space between his shoulder blades. It is not a hug. It is maybe something close.

He’s known since they met that she is a witcher. She knows that, has known that, but is still always careful: she has never taken her potions around him, has kept her eyes purple, never black, wears her medallion tucked under her shirts and out of sight. Has never fought any creatures that would have required her to show any truly freakish strength, not in front of him. A witcher, maybe, but the palatable kind. The kind where, she hopes, he could almost forget it.

Eskel looks like a witcher. Eskel wears his medallion where everyone can see it, and still Jaskier stared him down and didn’t shrink away.

Yennefer has trusted him since she met him, probably. It still shakes her to realize it, right now, for the first time. Jaskier is her friend. He’s _hers_.

She doesn’t think that Jaskier means to change everything, that night. He does, anyways.

\---

The next time they part, Yennefer sees Jaskier off to Oxenfurt then makes her way further inland, adorns herself with her most ostentatious jewels. No one at the temple academy questions her in the slightest: she’s been rubbing shoulders with rich assholes for long enough now that it’s a simple matter to say the right things, to talk her way into a meeting in the guise of a noblewoman considering options for the education of her children.

“This way, Lady, please.” One of the servants leads her under the awning of the stout, but imposing building, engraved with religious verses, and into a small courtyard. The meager attempt at a garden is bare, this time of year, save for the fallen leaves that crunch underfoot. There are three young children, students, presumably, giggling in a corner, though they fall silent respectfully as Yennefer passes. Sweet little things. Yennefer makes the sign for aard and sends leaves skittering across the stone towards them. They laugh, delighted, and Yennefer forces herself not to smile. It wouldn’t be suitable, to be smiling for what she’s here to do.

She’s shown to the office of the oldest, most miserable-looking crone that she has ever seen. The woman’s brows, even drooped with age, are harsh and furrowed. She must have looked fearsome, when she was younger. There is a wooden switch sitting in a place of honour on her desk.

“Madame Xenia?” Yennefer confirms, once they have been left alone.

“I’m informed that you’re interested in my establishment?”

Yennefer takes a seat without waiting to be offered one. “You taught Julian,” she says, because beating around the bush is pointless. “The Viscount de Lettenhove.”

Madame Xenia’s face brightens with recognition. “A good family,” she says, nodding wisely. “An old family.” Her face sours, and she shrugs a gnarled shoulder. “A rotten child.”

Yennefer’s hand twitches toward her knife. “You used to beat him,” she says, a question. An accusation, though Xenia doesn’t appear to take it as one.

“A rotten child,” she repeats, scornful. “Completely deviant.”

Well.

Yennefer rises gracefully from her seat, smoothing down her dress. “He is a brat, isn’t he?” she agrees, walking around the desk so she is in front of the old hag, looking down at her. “Still, he’ll miss me someday, when I die.” She leans down and looks the woman who hurt Jaskier directly in the eyes, then slowly, deliberately, slides her ring off of her finger and feels her glamour melt away. She pauses a moment, to allow Madame Xenia to be truly and properly frightened at the twisted girl-thing before her; then says, “Not one person on this continent will miss you.”

She crushes the old woman’s neck, one-handed, before she can scream.

It looks painful. Yennefer hopes it was.

She straightens, puts her ring back on, and, as the person she chooses to be, leaves to rejoin her friend.


	2. Chapter 2

Being rich, Yennefer decides, has a tendency to ruin people, which would be more concerning to her if she hadn’t been thoroughly ruined long ago. Having been pre-ruined, she finds that being rich suits her quite nicely.

She’s had thirty years, since beginning to travel with Jaskier, to brick over memories of sobbing helplessly after days of witcher training and being laughed out of taverns, _gods above and below, I didn’t think anything that ugly existed_ , with the far more pleasant distractions of being able to do whatever she wants. Time passes, but revenge remains a lucrative business.

The lazy passage of summers and more summers is a haze of beautiful new clothing and Jaskier’s music and, yeah, murders, more than a few murders. Yennefer gets to watch a unicorn running in a field, which is thrilling, and to watch the life bleed out of a smooth-tongued charlatan claiming to be a sorcerer and using the resulting prestige to have his way with innocent girls. She watches families sometimes, too, when no one else is watching her. Watches mothers hugging and scolding and adoring their children, watches the children adore their mothers right back, and wonders if she’s ever really wanted anything at all, or just what she can’t have.

She puts it all, children and families and the ache that either thought brings, out of her mind, and focuses on what she _can_ have. She and Jaskier share a bath in a gilded gold tub, soaked in lilac-scented oils and mind-clouding salts.

“To unrepentant and glorious hedonism,” Jaskier declares, holding up the bottle of aged wine they’ve been passing back and forth.

“To trashing this horrible bastard’s castle before the rest of his men arrive,” Yennefer says, then, pondering it, “Should we buy a castle?”

They don’t, because of the tiresome amounts of maintenance involved, but they do invest in a few tasteful manor houses that Jaskier decorates enthusiastically, not that he ever stays in one place longer than a couple of weeks, and that Yennefer fills with beautiful people and eager lovers, not that she ever entertains them longer than a night.

In that way, she and Jaskier remain opposites: he continues to fall for someone new most every place they go. Always human. Never nearly as invested in him as he is in them, and Yennefer doesn’t think she’ll ever understand his need to be loved by shoemakers and princesses and artists but, she reasons, he could have worse vices, and it’s not like it makes them any less effective at what they do.

“A room,” she orders, when they arrive at the latest small town plagued by a despotic duke with delusions of grandeur. “For myself and my concubine.” She taps Jaskier’s nose, sweetly condescending. “His stamina needs work, but his enthusiasm is endearing.”

Jaskier’s fake, pained smile lasts only until the innkeeper leaves, at which point he ducks to hiss in Yennefer’s ear, “My stamina, for your information, is perfectly adequate.”

He stammers, gloriously offended and ever dramatic. Easy to goad, the way he has been for decades, and it makes Yennefer smile. She likes their back-and-forth, the way it manages to be challenging and comforting at the same time, the way they don’t have to apologize for cattiness. They trade victories and losses in banter, a clashing of wits that has lasted their entire friendship and shows no signs of stopping.

“Admit that you’re kind,” Jaskier bosses, once the duke has been deposed and it turns out that in addition to a dictator, he was completely broke. The children in the town _cheered_. One of them, a little girl, took Yennefer’s hand and smiled at her and Yennefer had to ignore a lump in her throat. “You knew he had nothing and you helped the townsfolk anyway.”

“Go fuck a donkey,” Yennefer informs him, and now it’s Jaskier’s turn to smile, knowing that he’s won, and they travel on.

A forest, thousands of years old, is felled for lumber. Calanthe takes the throne in Cintra – too young for it, like her father was – and earns it with blood, only some of it human. Yennefer and Jaskier avoid her kingdom by mutual agreement. They have enough blood of their own on their hands.

Yennefer’s ring is nearly tugged off in a fight, that year, and she secures it before her glamour spell can falter, but she spends the rest of the evening compulsively checking on it as they’re made honoured guests of a local chieftain, waited on in large, billowing tents.

“Is your real appearance truly _that_ awful?” Jaskier asks, conversational, lounging on several large cushions and popping berries into his mouth. He’s hogging the whole bowl of fruits.

“What’s my current appearance, Jaskier, imaginary?” Yennefer counters. She says It rhetorically, mostly. No matter how much she lays claim to this body, how much justice and vengeance she metes out with these hands, everyone who knows she has a glamour will think it false, an illusion.

She holds out a hand, and Jaskier tosses her a small bunch of grapes while she answers for real. “There’s a reason that there aren’t female witchers,” she confides. “I think I only survived because I’ve got elven blood, it made the mutagens affect me differently.” She bites her lip. “I look- worse, than my male colleagues.”

Jaskier is watching her, attentive. “Worse how?”

“Worse like deformed.”

“Enough that you felt you needed to use nigh-impossible magics to alter your face and entire body.”

“It’s not vanity,” Yennefer says, sharper than before, defensive as she detects a hint of skepticism in his voice. He hasn’t seen her without her glamour, hasn’t seen the hunchback and the lopsided face and the hair unnaturally white, like something out of hell. “It’s practicality.”

“Explain,” Jaskier requests, rolling onto his stomach and peering up at her, chin resting on his arms. _Academic curiosity_ , Yennefer thinks, though, by this point, she knows it’s something more personal. He has a way of getting attached, Jaskier, and damn the consequences.

Yennefer chews on a grape, tucking her hair back behind an ear. “Of anything else I am,” she says, “or could be, ugly is the worst.”

“There are worse things to be than ugly,” Jaskier argues, straight away. “Boring. Disloyal.”

“You can be boring and disloyal and be respected and even loved,” Yennefer says, frank. “Not if you’re ugly. Not as a woman.”

She can tell that Jaskier is considering her words, wrestling with them. “As I’ve never been a woman, it appears I have to defer to your judgement,” he says, which Yennefer appreciates, but then, because he’s still a man and still Jaskier, he keeps talking, “ I still believe that beauty is more of a nebulous ideal than you think, though. A sunset and a marble statue don’t resemble each other in the slightest, and no one would argue that either is anything but beautiful.”

Yennefer scoffs, choosing the plumpest looking strawberry from the bowl resting on Jaskier’s stomach. “That’s simple enough for _you_ to say, have you looked at yourself?”

She regrets it as soon as she sees the shit-eating grin on Jaskier’s face. “Do my ears deceive me, or is this you admitting I’m attractive, Yennefer of Vengerberg?”

Yennefer rolls her eyes, leans over and traces Jaskier’s bottom lip with the strawberry. “Yes, Jaskier, take me now,” she deadpans.

“Say the word, Yen,” Jaskier says, oblivious, and it’s his usual flirty bantering bullshit, he doesn’t mean anything by it, obviously he doesn’t, but something about the moment- his lips close around the berry and Yennefer watches them redden, feels the sudden, dizzying urge to pin him down and taste the sweetness off of him for herself.

The rest of his face reddens too, when Yennefer smushes the berry against him, deliberately shattering the moment.

She’s-

_Feelings_ is a strong word, and not one she allows herself to dwell on. It’s an inconvenient physical reaction, nothing more, because Jaskier being attractive is deeply unfortunate and even more deeply none of Yennefer’s fucking concern, because she’s not enough of an idiot to bed a sorcerer and _certainly_ not enough of an idiot to bed a bard.

She looks at him, sometimes, even still. Not when he wants her to, because he does, half the time, flirting like second nature with her and with most anything that breathes, but in moments when his attention is elsewhere. It’s in those moments that Yennefer realizes, gradually and much to her consternation, that Jaskier is _handsome_. More than she thought, that night they first met. He’ll have his sleeves pushed up as he polishes his boots and her gaze will catch on his deceptively strong forearms, maybe from all his incessant gesturing; and for all the boyishness of his face he’s got a man’s hands, broad and purposeful in everything he does, moving along the neck of his lute when he’s putting on a show or toying with new words and notes for only himself and her. Yennefer watches the way he’s tender with his lovers as he leads them to his rooms, hears, sometimes, often, sounds of ecstatic pleasure through too-thin walls.

Never once since the very beginning of their mutual acquaintance has Jaskier reintroduced the subject of sleeping with her. Sometimes, not infrequently, she smells arousal on him, feels a distinctly sexual tension, but Jaskier could have sexual tension with a gust of wind – he’s not exactly discerning. Certainly never makes any advances towards her, which is the most damning thing of all, because he’s never in the decades she’s known him been shy.

He doesn’t want her like that. The realization stings a little, because if Yennefer was going to want to be wanted by somebody, if she was ever going to fall in love with anyone, it would be him. She supposes, eventually, that it’s a compliment. Someone loves her without it being a byproduct of trying to fuck her. It’s a first.

She doesn’t dwell. She’s not the sort to invite romance. Also not the sort to risk her relationship with the person she cares about more than anything in the world, except herself.

Yennefer is not Jaskier. Love, in any of its forms, is not on her path, and not something she intends to waste her time wanting. That’s that.

\---

Somewhere far away, in a small house that no one important knows or cares about, a boy is born, with amber eyes. Destiny, curled up somewhere even farther away next to Yennefer’s kindness and several gods and other things that don’t exist, sits and waits.

\---

The cost of luxury, of the beautiful things with which they surround themselves, is a reputation; and the cost of a reputation as folk heroes, fucking with the rich and helping the poor, is that the rich people with whom they fuck increasingly find themselves with a chance to prepare.

It tends not to impact Yennefer overmuch, materially. No human stands a chance against her in combat, prepared or not. That’s her oversight: she plans for humans, not for what the humans’ coin can buy.

Things go wrong almost immediately. Their latest quarry, perhaps hearing of them via song or perhaps just paranoid of inevitable consequences that arise when you kidnap children from rich families, retreats behind the gate of his keep, and a circle of mages appears in defensive positions.

An ambush.

Yennefer cuts through as many as she can, but Jaskier knows more of magic than she does, sees the lost cause it is.

“It’s no use!” he shouts over the blasts of magical energy, and Yennefer yells in rage, but he’s right, there will be no getting to their target from here, so she lets Jaskier take her hand and tug her through a portal.

They emerge in a calm, swaying field of grass, and get to enjoy a split second of the illusion of safety before another portal opens and the mages come pouring through after them.

“Shit,” Yennefer swears, readying her sword as Jaskier gets to summoning another portal. It takes them two more to figure that they are being magically tracked, and four more to identify the cause as the gilded dagger taken months ago and stowed at the bottom of a bag, at which point Jaskier is looking absolutely dead on his feet. Magic has a price. Magic has always had a price.

Now, when they stagger through one last portal, the dagger safely abandoned, Yennefer spares a moment to take in their surroundings – a dirty alleyway, muddy with rain, and bustle of a village around them – before she’s reaching out to steady Jaskier as he all-but-collapses into her arms, utterly drained.

“We’re safe,” she tells him, when enough breathless moments have passed, and Jaskier just blinks at her. He’s never had to use this much of his power at once, and it has clearly exhausted him, emotionally and physically.

“Where-” he grips her arm, peering around with some effort. “Where’d I bring us?”

“Let’s find out.” Yennefer pulls his arm across her shoulders, secures hers around his waist, and they make their way out of the alley.

Even rain-drenched and coming out the ugly end of a dozen portals, she is beautiful enough and sweet enough, when she tries to be, that it’s easy enough to get answers. They’re a few miles east of Oxenfurt – it’s always Oxenfurt, for Jaskier – a quaint, lively village, even drenched with rain with dark clouds rolling in overhead promising more. When Yennefer inquires as to where they might rent horses and a carriage, the matronly woman at the inn directs them to the outskirts of town, to the alderman’s house, so that’s where they go and that’s where, predictably, they’re stymied.

“We need any carriage you have,” Yennefer says. “Just to the city.”

“I’d be mad to send you out at this hour,” the alderman says, not unfriendly. “Nilfgaardian scouts have been seen out at night, the mad Southern fuckers have been getting bolder and bolder.”

“We’re not asking for a guard detachment, we’re asking for a horse and carriage, coin isn’t an issue,” Yennefer snaps, and the alderman looks at her, pitying, _dismissing_.

Jaskier speaks up, almost managing to hide the strain in his voice, laying a hand at the small of her back. “Please, sir, my wife and I have to make it home before morning. We don’t want to worry the children, you understand.” He gives a charming smile, then looks at Yennefer adoringly, the picture of the devoted husband and father. His hand is moving behind her back, making his words weighty with the last dregs of magic he can muster. “Isn’t that right, Agatha?”

Bastard.

The lie or the magic or just being spoken to by a man instead of a woman work on the alderman, as they tend to do. “Can’t have the children worrying,” he relents, even cracking a small smile. “I’ll have the stable boy prepare the horses.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” Jaskier says, bowing his head gratefully. He slumps against Yennefer as soon as the man is out of the room, and she takes his weight easily, holding him upright.

“The children?” she asks as she half-carries him to the nearest chaise, quietly, in case they’re still being listened to. It’s not their usual backstory.

Jaskier nods toward the opposite wall, to the portrait above the mantle. It’s well-done, a painting of the man they spoke to next to a round-faced woman and three identically adorable little girls. The look on the man’s face is identical to the one Jaskier gave her while lying. A family man, then. “Soft touch, Aggy,” he says, then, when Yennefer dumps him unceremoniously into the cushions, “ _Ow_ , yeah, I deserved that, worth it.”

He squeezes his eyes shut, wincing as he shifts to get comfortable. Yennefer sits at the end of the chaise, tucking her feet up. Her medallion isn’t even doing its normal Jaskier hum – he’s truly spent.

The three little girls in the portrait seem to be watching her. The lie slipped so easily from Jaskier’s lips.

“Do you ever think about it?” Yennefer asks, impulsively.

Jaskier opens an eye, peers up at her from where his head was lolling against the arm rest. “Hm?”

“Children,” Yennefer clarifies. Watches him, carefully.

“Not much point, is there?” Jaskier says, closing his eyes again and settling back into his comfortable position. “They yanked out all my babymaking bits when they made me pretty and magical.”

“But if they hadn’t,” Yennefer presses, not sure what answer she’s even looking for, but Jaskier doesn’t give it.

“Then I’d have to stick to bedding men, wouldn’t I?” he says, practical. “I mean, can you even imagine it, miniature bards running around, I can’t think of anything worse.” Yennefer smiles, reluctantly, at the mental image, and it spurs Jaskier on. “One blue eye and one purple, musically stabbing people, come _on_. I was a nightmare of a child, gods have mercy on anyone who’d have to deal with my offspring.”

He’s right. He’s entirely right, and even if he wasn’t, the life they lead isn’t a life for a family. A family needs- Yennefer doesn’t know, actually, because the closest thing she has are foggy memories of her mother crying when she was taken away from the family farmhouse as a child, but that’s at least a part of it, she’s fairly sure, having a place that it would be painful to leave. Fuck knows she hasn’t got that.

“Why?”

Yennefer looks away from the portrait and back at Jaskier when he pipes up. “Why what?”

“Why do you ask?”

She shrugs. “I think about it,” she says, quiet, and Jaskier laughs out loud.

He _laughs_.

The humiliation clenches in Yennefer’s stomach, takes an agonizing heartbeat to ignite into anger, white-hot. She shouldn’t have said it aloud. She doesn’t know why the fuck she told him that, no one needs to know something that shameful, that pathetically hopeless.

Jaskier, ever quick on the uptake, clues in to the fact that she’s not laughing and blinks owlishly. “You’re fucking with me,” he says, his eyes still creased with the remnants of his smile. Yennefer watches the slow, dawning realization print itself on his face. “You’re not joking, you actually want to be a mother?”

“Sincerely, fuck off,” Yennefer snarls, and Jaskier is still gaping at her when the alderman returns to tell them that their carriage is ready. She stomps outside without bothering with false gratitude, leaves Jaskier to struggle to his feet and pay the alderman on his own, and is already in the carriage, staring determinedly out of the window when she hears him join her.

Neither of them speaks, but the carriage ride is not silent. Yennefer doesn’t allow herself to look at Jaskier, because if she does she’ll either scream or burst into tears, neither of which would be especially dignified. She focuses instead on the rhythmic turning of the wheels – one of the axels is crooked, the carriage dips every so often – the sound of the horses’ hooves, the coachman humming to himself up front. Every sound is dimmed under the barrage of rain, getting heavier instead of lessening as they drive.

It’s still pouring when their carriage arrives at the outskirts of Oxenfurt proper, and as they roll to a stop, Jaskier finally speaks.

“Yen,” he says, as Yennefer rises from her seat. She ignores him, pushes open the carriage door without waiting for the coachman to be chivalrous about it and starts along the puddle-filled cobblestones. A dandelion pokes up through the stone, bent double by the rain.

Jaskier’s footsteps splash as he hurries after her.

“Yennefer,” he pleads. “Please-” He catches her arm, and Yennefer wheels around to glare at him.

“What?” she snaps, and Jaskier’s eyes find hers.

“I’m sorry,” he says, plainly. “I was an ass, just- unequivocally.” His tongue darts out to wet his lips. “I’m sorry. Truly.”

The transparent sincerity of it cracks any wall Yennefer managed to make during the carriage ride. ‘Humble’ is not an adjective she’d ever, _ever_ use for Jaskier. It is now.

“I know it can’t happen,” she says, hoarse with bitterness and sadness and still-there-embarrassment at the admission, because that’s what it is.

“People want things that can’t happen all the time,” Jaskier says. “We learn to live with it, because we have no choice, but that doesn’t make us want them less.” It’s not the voice he does when he’s trying to charm someone into feeling a certain way. It’s- he sounds, strikingly and simply, sad. Like he knows what it is to want and not have, which catches Yennefer by surprise. What could he want that isn’t offered to him readily?

Jaskier blinks like he’s only just remembering himself; tears his gaze away from her and drops his grip on her wrist before clearing his throat, and he sounds more himself, if slightly tentative, when he says, “You never told me.”

“It’s not-” Yennefer fights against the urge to clam up, blinking hard against the lashing rain. Just speaks. “I want to be important, I want to be needed, to have the power to make things good and- and safe, for someone, I want that.”

It’s not her most eloquent. Not half her most eloquent.

Jaskier listens anyways, his face doing something complicated, then says, “You’d be a good mother.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Yennefer spits, speaking over him even before he’s finished.

“I’m not,” he shakes his head and holds her gaze, unwavering. “You would.”

It’s almost worse than the laughter.

Yennefer swallows. “Well, I won’t be,” she says, her voice only mostly steady. “So.”

Jaskier has always been as easy with his touches as with his words: he folds her into a hug, and Yennefer sinks into it, and even as the rain half-drowns them both, they don’t move.

Yennefer remembers being told, as a child, ‘witchers don’t feel’. She must have succeeded in her goal of not being one, she thinks, drily, and can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad one.

When Jaskier finally speaks, quiet into her hair, he sounds troubled. “I wish I could do that for you.”

Yennefer tries for a derisive scoff, playing with her ring behind his back. “Who said I’d want them with you?”

Jaskier gives a small, sad laugh. “Yeah, fair point, I’d be shit. D’you remember when you tried to make me hold that baby?”

Yennefer laughs, and the sound is choked, but real. He really was shit at it.

Though-

She imagines, later, when they are warm and dry inside of Jaskier’s Academy lodgings, what it would be like if things were different. Imagines Jaskier dancing with a little girl the way she’s seen fathers do, imagines herself holding a tiny infant and being its entire world, and then, with a forceful shake of her head, imagines a world in which her mind is less of a steaming pile of sentimental fucking garbage. She’s been listening to too many of Jaskier’s damn songs.

Though-

His next song – for her, they’re nearly always for her – is softer than the others, sadder, and this time he doesn’t sing about the violet eyed maiden but about a wolf and her cubs. It’s a repetitive sort of song, echoic verses where the cubs are lost one by one, and Yennefer hears it for the apology it is. Finds herself wishing that she could hear more in it, something longing. Longing for her. If she was the kind of person to fall in love-

_Oh_ , she thinks with a thud, as Jaskier sings, soft and beautiful, and her heart aches for him. _Oh, fuck._

\---

Somewhere else, the amber eyed infant is an amber eyed child. He runs and learns and does more than his share of chores, free of the burdens that would be his in another life. The boy is serious, old for his age, and, to his mother’s chagrin, infinitely more comfortable talking to animals than to other children his age. She frets about it when she thinks he can’t hear. The boy escapes to the stables and strokes the nose of his favourite filly.

“You understand, Roach,” he says, soothing though Roach doesn’t look particularly troubled. She presses her nose into his palm nonetheless, soothing in return.

The boy is a practical child, not one for self-reflection: he bids Roach farewell and returns to his chores, doesn’t dwell on the distinct and, as far as he can tell, baseless feeling that he’s destined for something more. Feelings don’t get chores done. Besides. Destiny, he’s quite confident, doesn’t really exist.

\---

(“The violet eyed maiden” is spoken in hushed voices and sung in triumphant ones, wherever they go. The original song is on its next generation of fans, forty years later, and tends to be sung with a flute accompaniment, which drives Jaskier half-insane.

“Bloody folk songs,” he grumbles, when he and Yennefer are sat at a bar and the local bard starts on a rendition. “That’s what they’ve turned my masterpieces into.”

“You know the one who wrote this, bard?” asks the barkeep, evidently both eavesdropping and curious.

Jaskier lights up the way he always does when he’s mistaken for a human. “A mentor of mine,” he says solemnly. “Most brilliant bard ever to walk the continent. Also extremely handsome.”

“And him, he knew the maid with violet eyes?”

Jaskier pouts at losing the spotlight while Yennefer grins into her drink. “Trust me, she’s a bit of a dick, actually,” Jaskier says, petty.

“More of one than you’ve got, or-” Yennefer swats him away, laughing, when he flicks a hand and magically makes all of her hair stand on end.

It’s not so terrible, sometimes, being in love with him. The physical attraction, she’s long since grown used to ignoring, and the – ugh – emotional stuff she can ignore as well, sinking gratefully into the concealment of their usual banter. They tease each other, trading veiled insults and being generally threatening to anyone else who’d dare insult the other. Jaskier writes songs about her, Yennefer pretends to hate them, and he comes back to her whenever they part with stories and trinkets and always, always-

“I’m in love,” Jaskier sings, when they reunite in Kaedwen, and, because he has no shame or self-preservation, takes Yennefer by the hand and twirls her around, joyous and clueless and adoring of someone else.

Sometimes, being in love with him is terrible.

He collapses onto Yennefer’s bed, sighing dreamily while she braces herself to hear about whatever human he’s decided to lavish his affections on.

“She’s the Countess de Stael,” Jaskier says, without waiting to be asked. “And she’s the smartest person I’ve ever met – aside from us, obviously – and listen, when I say she’s fantastic in bed, Yen, understand that it is the most _grievously_ shameful understatement, I did _not_ know I was that flexible-”

“Ew,” Yennefer says delicately, and gives it, in her head, five months. The smart ones tend to last longer, and the Countess is older, which means she presumably has at least some idea of what she enjoys.

It lasts four and a half, and Yennefer finds Jaskier with his head in his hands sat at a bar, wearing his heartbreak like a cloak.

She trails a finger down the back of his neck. “What was it this time?” They usually realize that he can’t magically grant them immortality or eternal youth, or grow jealous at the fact that all of his songs are about someone else.

“She liked someone else better,” Jaskier mumbles, morosely. “And now I can’t even use her library.”

Yennefer doesn’t know what the fuck he’d want with a library, but she also doesn’t know why someone, having Jaskier, would ever be stupid enough to decide they don’t want him, so she focuses on that one, to be a good friend. “She was aging horribly anyways, the old bitch, you looked like you could be her son.”

Jaskier is shaking his head as she speaks. “She was lovely,” he says, hardly even an argument, he sounds so beaten down as he turns and leans into her hand. You would think his heart would’ve become accustomed to being broken.

Yennefer scratches at the stray hairs at the nape of his neck. “Why do you bother?” she asks, quieter than before. Humans are fickle and cruel. She has never understood his affinity.

Jaskier shrugs. “Music is the nearest thing to immortality they have,” he says. “Every piece of art they make is so much more important because it might be all that’s left of them, and they’re- they’re vital and beautiful and I want something I do to matter that much.”

Sometimes, being in love with him is like looking into a mirror.

Jaskier kisses her hand absently.

Yennefer doesn’t know how to do anything but want.)

\---

The next time that everything changes, it’s the result of a confluence of things going horribly wrong in quick succession.

First: the abandoned palace where a murderous stepmother was apparently taking refuge turns out to be inhabited by a striga. Second: Yennefer doesn’t clue in to that fact until Jaskier is pulling open the door and she smells the stale reek of ancient death and has to tackle him out of the way. Third: she hasn’t fought a real monster in decades.

Muscle memory doesn’t fade – she fights the creature through the overgrown palace grounds, just barely keeps it at sword point from ripping her to pieces as Jaskier circles, trying to get a clean shot at it. It’s too strong, even for her, at least without-

“My potions,” Yennefer gasps out loud, when the striga has her backed against the precipitous drop of a cliff’s edge. She hasn’t killed anything non-human in years and years, has deliberately avoiding needing them and certainly not in front of anyone, but she’s outmatched, and she has no intention of allowing herself or Jaskier to be brutally killed on some cliff in the middle of nowhere.

She ducks and rolls under the creature, uses the second that it buys her to unstopper the vial from her pack. The liquid inside is old, practically sludge-like by now. Yennefer hopes it doesn’t expire.

Jaskier appears at her side. “Yen, what are you-”

“Saving our lives,” Yennefer says, and dreads it, but doesn’t let herself hesitate, just chokes down the potion and gasps at the sensation of it coursing through her, a long-forgotten sensation. It feels like burning, everything inside of her alight as her veins darken, as the world takes on the dark tinge that it does as her eyes blacken.

The monster lets out a murderous howl.

“Get out of the way,” Yennefer orders Jaskier, glancing at him – she’s braced for him to look horrified, for the judgement and terror she’ll see on his face, because he’s never seen her like this, like a real witcher, the kind people fear and mothers tell their children to avoid.

“Yen,” he breathes, and his eyes look _wanting_ , and Yennefer doesn’t even begin to have time to process any of that, because the striga charges. She grabs Jaskier by the front of his shirt and tosses him bodily out of the way, lets out a yell with the exertion as she drives her sword upward through the striga, rending it nearly in half, but not before it backhands her with one clawed hand, sending her flying backward off the cliff and into nothingness.

Yennefer reaches out, hands scrambling wildly for some sort of hold even as she knows it’s futile. The air races around her, and she doesn’t close her eyes, won’t, determines herself to face death with every bit of excruciating detail her senses provide. Then the breath is punched out of her as something crashes against her.

She barely has time to register Jaskier’s smell and the feel of his arms around her and the ground hurtling toward them before there’s a familiar gusting sound and, bracing for impact-

They fall through the portal and onto a carpeted floor.

Yennefer chokes on her breath.

“Jaskier,” she says, and his hand finds hers. She can hear his heart racing, can practically taste the adrenaline coming off him.

“We’re alright,” Jaskier pants, seemingly disbelieving, seemingly as much to himself as to her. “We’re _alive_.” He lets loose a string of elated cursing, and Yennefer catches her breath.

He jumped, is the first thing she realizes, the idiot mage jumped off a sheer fucking cliff after her; and the second thing she realizes is that he _saw_ her. Sees her, now, with her eyes black and bloodlust coursing through her veins, something monstrous, and he _liked_ it.

Yennefer isn’t consciously aware of deciding to kiss him, but she does, and then they are, and it’s the adrenaline of nearly dying or the pent-up anticipation of fifty-seven years of being two attractive people not kissing each other or maybe just the nature of who they are, but it’s immediately and overwhelmingly intense. She’s on top of him, her knees on either side of his hips as she kisses him, catching his bottom lip in her teeth, and Jaskier gives as good as he gets, his hands at her waist, circling her back, pulling her ever closer. Yennefer is caught in the taste of him, the scent, and she grinds down against him instinctively; Jaskier gasps against her lips at the contact and they break off, both breathing heavily.

Monstrous, she is, and still Jaskier is looking at her like she’s something wonderful. The moment crystalizes, this infinitely fragile, brittle thing, and Yennefer _wants_ him, thinks she can have him, now, but first-

She touches her ring, the one she hasn’t taken off since she got it.

“Yen,” Jaskier breathes, following her train of thought. His lips are swollen pink.

“Shut up,” Yennefer says, then, heart pounding, slips off the ring without letting herself second guess.

She doesn’t take her eyes off of Jaskier’s as the glamour spell falls. The face and body that used to be hers, that she’s fastidiously ignored for the greater part of her life, reveal themselves to her and Jaskier both. Her hair is an unnatural silvery white, her spine crooked and making the rest of her body lopsided, her face scarred and gnarled at one side.

_Are you frightened yet_ , she can’t bring herself to ask.

Jaskier, as he tends to do, finds his voice first. “You’re-”

“If you even try to call me pretty-”

“I wasn’t going to,” Jaskier says. Yennefer believes him. He knows her better than that. “Can I…”

She stays still, hardly breathes as he reaches up and touches a lock of her hair, looking fascinated. Not frightened. He never looks frightened.

He curls the end of her hair around a finger, meets her eyes. “Can I kiss you again?” he asks, quietly.

“Yes,” Yennefer says, and lets him. Lets herself lean into the hand he places on her jaw, into the way his lips part against hers, somehow both sweet and filthy. She knows that this, kissing, touching, is him speaking to her in the best way he knows how, though it’s easy to get lost in it all the same: it’s not romantic, not quite, but there’s a tenderness to it that makes her ache. She’s never kissed anyone without her glamour.

Nearly sixty years, Yennefer has known him, and the strangeness of it suddenly hits her, that there would still be anything about him to surprise her. She supposes she’s probably a surprise to him as well, like this. The realization makes her want, impossibly, to laugh.

“You’re still insane, you have the worst taste in people,” she whispers, a hand on his neck.

Jaskier crinkles his nose. “And you still react to any hint of sincere emotion by lashing out, but see, your hurtful, hurtful words don’t even affect me anymore, I’m immune from long exposure.”

Yennefer rolls her eyes, tries to look disdainful, but Jaskier’s half-smile, hopeful and as tentative as she’s seen it, catches her, makes her aware of the gravity of the situation. Judging by the way he breathes out but doesn’t move closer, he reaches the same conclusion.

“Is this going to ruin our friendship?” he asks.

“No,” Yennefer says, then, “I don’t know. You have sex with lots of people without ruining friendships.”

Jaskier inclines his head, conceding the point. He’s still toying with her hair. “They’re not you.”

“No,” Yennefer agrees, something inside her thrilling at being an exception, and it’s harder to blame on the impulsivity of near-death, this time, when she leans down and meets his lips again. This kiss is slower than the last, exploratory. Yennefer has lost track of how many years she’s wondered about what it would be to kiss him.

Jaskier’s breath quivers, just for an instant, when she pulls back.

“Well, if you want me _that_ badly,” he teases, dry, and Yennefer gives him an unimpressed look which, admittedly, is somewhat undercut by the way she tears his shirt open immediately after. It’s expensive fabric. They can afford more.

“Don’t get cocky,” she says.

Jaskier doesn’t look troubled in the slightest, the reminder that she’s stronger than him clearly working for him. “Have you met me literally ever, Yennefer, just wondering?”

So _annoying_ , no wonder he’s a bard.

It’s simpler, from there, the way things have always been between them. They’re both accustomed to taking what they want, so that’s what they do, Yennefer trailing her fingers down Jaskier’s chest, her breath catches as he sweeps her hair out of the way to slide her sleeves down and kiss a path from her lips and down her neck, along the sweep of her shoulder.

“Hang on,” Yennefer says, and when Jaskier pauses, she sits up and slips her ring back onto her finger, relaxes as the glamour takes and her body returns to the way she’s grown accustomed to, to the way she chose. She knows her face is doing the same; watches Jaskier watch it change, propped up on his elbows.

“You don’t have to,” he says.

“This is me,” Yennefer says, with conviction. “This, I want to be- this.” This _her_ of her own making, this person that people cannot look at without thinking _powerful_.

“Okay,” Jaskier says, simply, because he has changed too, his name and his life. He understands. “Alright.”

And that’s that, and then-

He’s kissing her neck, lingering at the sensitive places that make Yennefer gasp, his hands rucking her skirts up, exploring, and Yennefer grabs his wrists, pins them easily on either side of his head, though Jaskier goes willingly.

“I want to fuck you,” she says, watching carefully for his reaction.

“Yeah, was sort of getting that impression.”

“No, I want-”

It takes a moment to click, and then Jaskier looks _thrilled_ , “Gods above, yeah, fuck, have at it, then.”

And then-

“How was this made, then?” Yennefer asks, curious, holding up the glass cock that Jaskier procures from within a carved wooden box. She’s never seen one of this material. It seems vaguely dangerous.

Jaskier, completely naked and slick with oil and spread out shamelessly like a thing for her leisure, _glares._ “We _could_ have a riveting dialogue on the alchemical properties of non-shattering glass, or, just a suggestion, you could quit being a bloody tease, you horrible, terrible-”

“And I thought you were needy _before_ ,” Yennefer complains, but she kisses his shoulder blade and sets about seeing just how needy she can make him.

(And-

They share a bath, after, and Yennefer sinks in up to her chin, watches her hair splay out atop the water, and feels Jaskier watching her.

“Friendship ruined?” he asks, casual.

“Yes, completely,” Yennefer agrees. Casual.

She wants to touch him again. Maybe to bite him. Maybe to have him wrap his arms around her and play with her hair and murmur sweet nothings and other disgustingly tender imaginings.

“What?” she asks, when she finally looks up and Jaskier is still staring.

Jaskier shrugs a shoulder, making a little ripple in the bath. “Waiting for you to admit you’ve been in love with me all along,” he says lightly, though his eyes flicker to hers, searching. A joke. An unintentionally stinging one.

Yennefer makes herself roll her eyes. “You first,” she says, and it hovers there, the moment spun out a heartbeat, two, into the space between them, a space the size of someone else, a whole third not-person sitting there in the space she can’t bring herself to bridge.

_You first_ , she thinks, a hope, this time, and then refuses to allow herself to feel disappointed when Jaskier scoops up a handful of bubbles and blows them at her, and if his smile wavers too, it’s a trick of the light.

Whatever brief spell they were both under, it is past. Yennefer splashes him. “Idiot,” she says, fond.

“Stubborn wretch,” Jaskier says, and the familiarity of it is comforting. It’s them. Only just them.

Just friends. Just sex. Yennefer can do that.)

\---

Somewhere far away, the amber-eyed boy has grown, is still growing, into a youth; strong and tall and still mostly antisocial.

He learns to fight with a sword and that if he scowls at the baker he looks intimidating enough to get a good price for fresh bread. Beds two women and one man and resigns himself to the fact that letting himself be touched doesn’t mean he’ll be understood or truly wanted. He ventures from his farm once, goes to a far off place and finds himself entirely out of his depth in unpleasant surprises, then vows to himself never to leave again. The world of magic and monsters and the people who walk amongst them isn’t for him.

\---

Together and apart, though the former more than the latter, Yennefer and Jaskier make their way through the years, and if she’s not the kind of person someone can be in love with, she’s the kind of person who can matter to someone more than anyone else, which seems a reasonable consolation.

Once, in the hazy coolness of autumn, they end up as near Kaer Morhen as Yennefer has been in years. She imagines that she can see the top of the mountains through the fog, something out of a distant memory.

Jaskier sees her staring and squeezes her hand. He’s the only one alive who knows why the place would have any meaning to her. The only one alive to know most things about her. Julian de Lettenhove and the nobody little girl taken to become a witcher are long dead to everyone but each other, leaving a curiously unaging vigilante and her equally unaging and infinitely louder companion in their places. They know each other completely, and that knowledge burns like something fierce inside of Yennefer. She’ll never be a mother, but she imagines, sometimes, that it would be something not entirely distinct from this, the protectiveness that she feels over the tangled thing that is her and Jaskier. She wonders, sometimes, too, whether she’s fucked up for even comparing her Jaskier-feelings to something familial, now that they regularly sleep together.

Yennefer has never been one for false modesty: they’re incredibly fucking good at sex.

It makes sense, logically. They both are – and have always been – greedy for pleasure, and Yennefer will swallow her tongue before she admits it to him, but she’s been wanting him for _decades_ , and he certainly doesn’t disappoint. She understands, now, the lofty praise that’s always been whispered and occasionally sung about Jaskier’s prowess as a lover. He treats sex like something joyous, like love is the altar at which he worships, and Yennefer has known that, but it’s quite another thing entirely to be the object of that prayer.

They have time, as much of it as they want, to try different things. Sometimes they sleep with just each other; sometimes with half a town at once, coaxed in by Jaskier’s music or magic or the sight of them. Yennefer likes those times, enjoys the lasciviousness of a dozen or dozens of bodies moving together, of watching Jaskier come apart under someone else’s hands as she tells them what to do to him. Witchers need nothing and no one, but Yennefer has them anyways, as many of them as she could want and Jaskier, always Jaskier.

Time passes in fits and starts, human fashions and traditions changing the same way. Nilfgaard is still backwards, still blustering about starting shit the way backwards kingdoms are wont to do. Rumours of elven insurgents trickle down from the edge of the world. Yennefer ignores all these affairs of men, spends time having her sword repaired by a master smith then makes her way to Oxenfurt, where Jaskier has been teaching an advanced balladry course.

Their reunion, when he returns to his quarters to find Yennefer, consists of a few fondly barbed insults, after which he drops to his knees and gets to work, buried between her legs for so long that Yennefer loses track of time as Jaskier makes her shake and gasp and cling to the sheets tightly enough to forget her strength and tear them to ribbons.

He’s chatty, after, the way he always is, resting a head on her thigh and carrying on a conversation about human affairs that Yennefer can’t muster up the energy to more than half-listen to as she’s catching her breath.

“-and then the king’s sister died, which, if you ask me, was a bit too convenient, given the rumours circulating about their extraordinarily close bond, if you take my meaning, and- hm, what else… oh, the as-yet-unborn princess of Cintra apparently has been promised to some nobody by the law of surprise, I can’t _believe_ I wasn’t there to see it.”

“Always the bloody law of surprise.” Yennefer makes a face, spares a thought for the poor child, her fate out of her hands before she’s even got a choice in the matter.

Jaskier presses a kiss to Yennefer’s stomach, then to her breastbone. “Not for us,” he says, and Yennefer tilts his chin up, presses a thumb against his bottom lip.

“No,” she agrees, and tugging Jaskier up so she can kiss him properly, “No, we’re better at wanting, aren’t we?” She gets a hand around him, finds him already hard, long past eager.

She stays a week, while Jaskier finishes his lectures and performs for the hoards of wide-eyed students to whom he’s something of a celebrity. He smells of her, now, they smell of each other, and only Yennefer knows that, but even the humans see them and whisper, not knowing that Yennefer can hear them, about the two of them, the people from the songs.

Yennefer likes it; doesn’t hesitate to link her arm with Jaskier’s when they walk in town or to run a proprietary hand through his hair, all but saying aloud, _mine_.

“There’s a royal tutor in Posada whose students are disappearing,” Yennefer informs him, at the end of the week, and Jaskier hears it for the invitation that it is, his eyes lighting up with the opportunity for a new adventure and a new song and – Yennefer flatters herself – more time with her. When she leaves Oxenfurt that night, Jaskier follows. They go together, and all is as it should be.

\---

The year is cold, the trees barren and wind biting long after winter, when everything changes.

Yennefer slits the throat of a viscount who’s been murdering his wives; sends the seventh and latest wife back home to her family with a trunk of gold and jewelry for her troubles, and then reducing Jaskier to a trembling mess in the massive bed before he springs up and tugs her along to explore the rest of the massive house.

They’ve killed worse men, and robbed richer, but none with quite so gaudy a taste in clothing and décor. Yennefer supposes seven wives means seven dowries means a fair bit of disposable income. Not that it will do the viscount much good now. She places a tiara inlaid with opal on her head and admires herself in the mirror – she suits it, wearing a crown – while Jaskier prances around draped in a bright red, ridiculously bejeweled cloak, and that’s the last moment of Before, before After.

“I’m in love,” Jaskier tells her for at least the hundredth time, perched on the edge of the vanity while Yennefer is deciding whether or not it’s tasteless to steal makeup from a murdered woman.

“Oh?” she asks, disinterestedly, without looking away from her reflection. They part for a few months. Jaskier falls in love. She teases him for it. This is what they do.

Jaskier is nodding eagerly. “I was performing in Rivia,” he says, practically bouncing where he sits. “And I saw him sitting in a corner and brooding and then I talked to him and he told me to fuck off and I fell in love instantly.”

“Mm,” Yennefer says, then, so he’ll make an offended face, “Your standards for romance are certainly slipping, aren’t they?”

“Yennefer of Vengerberg, do _not_ start with me-”

She smiles to herself, small – she _smiles_ – as Jaskier works himself into an indignant rant, nearly musical in his complaining. The sound of his voice is familiar as worn-in shoes, and so is the small twist in Yennefer’s chest at him being in love, the pain practically a comfort by now. She’s long since stopped expecting him to fall in love with her; can comfort herself with the knowledge that this latest infatuation, whomever it’s for, will pass, same as all of the others.

Except-

Except that winter comes again, and passes again, and the infatuation does not.

Jaskier’s latest human talks to his horse.

Yennefer could almost laugh at it, if the thought of it, of _him_ , didn’t scrape her insides raw. Jaskier the bard, Jaskier the mage, Jaskier the mostly immortal and wholly fanciful, gone giddy and damn near worshipful over a man who talks to his fucking horse, not ‘occasionally gives a verbal greeting’ talks to his horse, but ‘carries out full, one-sided, philosophical conversations’ talks to his horse.

Yennefer watches him, once, from afar. Feels ridiculous doing it, though there’s no chance of her being seen, and she doesn’t see anything particularly scandalous. Jaskier’s newest infatuation has a house in a field near a forest in Rivia, and he trains horses. He looks older than they do, not that that’s worth fuck all. He’s tall, broad-shouldered. Has dark hair, usually tied back haphazardly, and dark eyes that glint amber in the sun. Handsome, in a rugged sort of way, perhaps, if he’d take a bath.

While Yennefer watches, he puts out feed and water, tidies around the stables, then sits on his fence and eats bread and cheese. It’s all just vastly mundane, even in light of Jaskier’s dubious enjoyment of humans and their mundanities. The man looks like he’s never even left the boundaries of his village. Nothing even remotely song-worthy.

Still, Jaskier goes to him, and goes again.

Yennefer watches Geralt of Rivia, watches him and searches for something, anything to give some clue as to why he’s so successfully stealing the affections of the only person she cares about, stealing them away from _her_ , and sees nothing. He seems wholly, bluntly simple, not so much unpretentious as much as it appears that the idea of pretention has never once crossed his mind.

Yennefer has never hated someone more.

She could break his neck without breaking a sweat. She _fantasizes_ about it, can picture precisely how it would feel to get a hand around his stupid muscular fragile human neck so Jaskier would stop appearing next to her and gushing about Geralt this and Geralt that like a child with a new plaything.

“I feel,” Jaskier announces, in the voice that means he’s either about to start waxing poetic or burst into song, “so, so incredibly lucky to have earned his friendship, Yen, he’s just- you know when some people are just _good_?”

“Friendship,” she repeats, skeptical. Maybe hopeful, in some shameful, deep-down part of her. “You said you were in love.”

“I am,” Jaskier says, in case Yennefer’s hope was getting any delusions of grandeur. “I am, but he doesn’t feel the same, I don’t think.”

“So find someone who does.”

“Ah, since when has love needed reciprocation to thrive?” Jaskier takes Yennefer’s hands in his, squeezing them tight. “The hurting’s half the fun, isn’t it?” He says it like a secret they share, clueless as to the way his words twist like a knife, and they twist again when he says, thoughtfully, “He reminds me of you, sometimes.”

Yennefer yanks her hands out of Jaskier’s grasp, sharply. “Do not compare me to him,” she snarls. “I’m nothing like him.”

Jaskier is the only person in the world who doesn’t look scared by her anger. “Someone’s snippy,” he raises his hands in mock-surrender, eyeing her curiously. “Who pissed in your morning oats?”

“Try being less of a bitch for ten seconds, Jaskier,” Yennefer snaps, then storms out of the room to go invent something to do to distract herself. In vain, she knos already.

She feels pathetic. That is not what she does, not a sensation she tolerates, and every action in her bloody life speaks to that. People dictate to her the limits and she defies them; she wants and she takes and she _gets,_ that’s how things work, that’s how she _makes_ things work, and if someone has something or someone that she wants, she obtains it for herself instead of wasting time with jealousy, because jealousy implies powerlessness, and that is not something she tolerates either. How _dare_ Geralt of Rivia, she thinks, how dare he barge in and capture Jaskier’s imagination and make Yennefer feel this powerless to do the same. She could survive Jaskier not loving her, she _was_ surviving that, knowing that she was at least as important to him as he is to her, but now-

She spends the rest of the day fuming, swearing to herself to go and fall in love with someone shiny and new and show Jaskier exactly how crap it feels. She ends up back in their rooms anyways, that night, sat next to Jaskier while he plucks out a simple melody on his lute. One of the strings needs tuning.

He pauses whatever song he’s working on and nudges her, gentle.

“Are you actually upset about something?” he asks, earnest enough that Yennefer can’t bring herself to snap at him again. “Because if someone’s upset you I can, will, and am practically frothing at the mouth to turn their genitals into root vegetables, and not even the sexy kind, you need only ask.”

He’s trying to make her smile. There was a time when Yennefer would have scowled out of spite at the attempt, a time before she allowed herself to become something made soft by a sorcerer determined to be a bard determined to be her friend. A sorcerer with garbage fucking taste in men.

That’s the crux of it: she can loathe Geralt of Rivia all she wants, but she can’t hate Jaskier. She could never.

“If someone upset me they’d be dead,” Yennefer says, and even manages to lace a thread of humour with her words. “But what, pray tell, is the root vegetable that you find sexy, Jaskier?”

“Well, now, that wasn’t what- look, it was a figure of speech, very common in art and poetry, not that I’d expect you to know the intricacies of _art,_ Yennefer-”

Yennefer curls into Jaskier’s side, closes her eyes to listen to him stammering through an argument.

_Choose me_ , she doesn’t say, but she catches a handful of his shirt, holds on, tightly, nearly desperately, and tries to will him to understand.

\---

Her hair is wavy when it comes out of her braid, except for a strand she missed near the front. It’s bothering her, the little strand, and Yennefer has all but torn apart the manor she’s currently occupying on the outskirts of Rinde, looking for something to curl it to match, when she’s distracted from the banalities of her current thoughts by the hammering of a heavy first on the oak front door.

She reaches instinctively for her swords. She’s not expecting anyone. The opposite, in the midst of a rainstorm like this, and if it were Jaskier, he wouldn’t bother knocking.

She makes her way down the grand staircase slowly, really not in the mood to have to kill any ill-advised robbers and ruin her hair in the process. The gales of wind make it more of a challenge than it usually is to push open the front door, and when she does, Yennefer nearly drops her sword.

Gracing her front step is Geralt of Rivia, rain-drenched and with an unconscious Jaskier flung over his shoulder.

“Lady Yennefer?” he asks, his eyes finding hers for the first time, and Yennefer doesn’t waste more than a split second of attention on him, not when Jaskier is limp in his arms and the sickly-sweet smell of his blood is filling the air.

“What did you do to him?” Yennefer demands, already stepping back to usher them in. She can hear Jaskier breathing. Poor comfort.

“Nothing,” says Geralt of Rivia, a puddle forming under him as he steps into the foyer. “He opened a portal into my house, said something about a djinn and then about you, and then he collapsed. I didn’t know where else to bring him.”

It’s the first time he has ever spoken to her. Yennefer gets the distinct impression that he is familiar with her anyways. She wonders what Jaskier has told him. Jaskier-

A djinn. Why the fuck would Jaskier have gone looking for a djinn? Why without _her_ ; he’s capable, certainly, but _Yennefer_ is the one who fights, _Yennefer_ is the one who protects them from danger. Protection Jaskier could have used, by the looks of it.

“Lay him down,” she orders, forcefully putting the djinn from her mind as Geralt of Rivia trails her into the large, empty house kitchens. He obeys, setting Jaskier down atop the wooden countertop, where Yennefer gives him a cursory look – he’s ghastly pale, rust-red stains all down his front as though he’s been coughing up blood – then makes her way to the cupboards. She’s no healer, no apothecary, but they learn rudimentary care during witcher training, and she doesn’t forget things once she learns them. The house is well-stocked with medicines and various restorative draughts, all of which she carries by the armful back into the kitchen.

“Wet a cloth for his forehead,” she says, because Jaskier’s skin is boiling to the touch, damp with sweat; while the horse farmer does that, Yennefer tips the most promising of the medicines into Jaskier’s mouth, tilting his chin up so he’ll swallow.

_Jaskier can’t die_. She repeats it like a mantra in her head, terse, and scarcely relaxes even when it becomes, gradually, _Jaskier won’t die_. Whatever the djinn did to him, he’ll feel like shit for at least a couple of weeks, but his breathing slowly becomes more regular, and she won’t lose Jaskier today, Yennefer is confident of that much, at least, as she works.

All the while, Geralt of Rivia stands silently, a hulking, looming spectre. He looks expressionless, even surly, so that the softness of his voice takes Yennefer aback when he breaks the silence, asks, “Will he be alright?”

“Obviously he’ll be alright, farm boy, he’s lived your lifetime five times over,” Yennefer says, coolly. The only response she receives is a “hm”.

She lays a finger against Jaskier’s neck, under the edge of his jaw. She can feel the steady thrum of his pulse, reassuring enough for her to finally breath properly, releasing some of the tension in her shoulders. Not much of it- now that she isn’t immediately occupied with preventing Jaskier’s death, she can fully devote herself to being annoyed at the presence of the infatuation, the thief of Jaskier’s affections, in her house. He’s big enough to block out the light if he stands in front of the fireplace, and he assaults her senses in every way, smelling of horse and rain and – Yennefer’s breath catches – of Jaskier.

She turns away to clean Jaskier’s blood from her hands, doesn’t manage to hold back a disgusted sound in her throat. It doesn’t go unnoticed.

“If I’ve done something to make you dislike me-” Geralt of Rivia starts to say, deep-voiced and rumbling, and Yennefer cuts him off, doesn’t bother restraining her sarcasm.

“Why, should we be braiding each other’s hair and gossiping about who he likes best?”

“We both know it’s you, seems a waste of time,” Geralt of Rivia says, and Yennefer glances at him for a long second before looking away again, disarmed in spite of herself. His quickness isn’t like Jaskier’s, all wit and bravado. It’s the quickness of honesty, instinctive and frank and almost in spite of the person to whom it’s addressed.

She has not had and does not have the impression that Geralt of Rivia is a man of many words, but he addresses her again, a few moments later. “Are you a mage like him?”

Yennefer breathes a laugh as she dips her hands into a pail of water. “No.”

“But you aren’t human either?”

“No,” she says again, and makes no offer of the truth. She owes him nothing. Less than nothing.

Geralt of Rivia nods once, then falls silent.

There is no sound but the crackling of the fire in the hearth. Yennefer flicks the water off of her hands, checks, from habit, that her ring and her glamour are still in place.

Thunder shakes the house.

Yennefer feels-

She feels awkward. It’s a new sensation, and not a pleasant one. She wonders if Geralt of Rivia is frightened of her. He doesn’t seem frightened. He’s just standing there, staring at Jaskier, watching the rise and fall of his chest, same as she is.

He carried Jaskier in his arms for miles, in a drowning rainstorm.

“Why haven’t you kissed him yet?” Yennefer asks. She keeps her voice distant, lofty, as when courtiers are condescending to address an inferior.

It takes Geralt of Rivia a long moment to answer. “I don’t… want to scare him,” he says, quietly. Doesn’t bother denying the desire to kiss Jaskier. “He’s my friend.”

Yennefer gets the overwhelming impression that it is a significant admission for him to make. “He doesn’t scare easily,” she says, out of loyalty.

A ghost of a smile crosses Geralt of Rivia’s face, the kind that belies shared experiences, conversations, of which Yennefer was not a part. Years its been, since Jaskier told her he loved this man. “I know.” He reaches out and, with a tenderness that contrasts with the sheer size of his hands, brushes Jaskier’s sweat-damp hair back from his forehead, adjusts the damp cloth there.

Yennefer thinks of Jaskier decades ago in Oxenfurt, imprinting on her like a fucking duckling after seeing her toss a coin to a poor barmaid; thinks of the way he melts whenever someone does something even approximating a kind act in his vicinity; then thinks of, watches Geralt of Rivia with his grumpy face and gentle hands and knows, with sudden conviction: Jaskier never stood a chance.

“You know what he and I do,” she says. Somewhere between lashing out and a real question.

“Are you talking about killing people or sleeping together?”

“Both,” Yennefer says, watching him from the opposite side of the table, the opposite side of Jaskier. “None of that frightens you?”

Geralt gives her a wry look, holds her gaze. “I don’t scare easy either.”

It’s not a declaration, really. It feels like one, anyways.

Yennefer swallows. Stands straighter.

The room is illuminated, just briefly, with a flash of lightning.

“Give me that hand towel,” she says, to say something.

Geralt glances at it – an embroidered thing, more pretty than useful, flung over a cupboard’s handle – then does, leaning just slightly over Jaskier to hand it to her. As Yennefer reaches for it, her fingers brush against Geralt’s, the rough skin there, and she starts at the sensation, like touching an open flame. When Geralt looks at her, his eyes are like pools of liquid amber, surprise evident there. She feels suddenly as though she knows those eyes. Has always known them, impossibly. He felt the same as she did. Feels-

Yennefer pulls her hand away, sharply. The hand towel flutters down, landing on Jaskier’s chest. Neither of them reaches for it.

“I-” Geralt starts, gruff, and Yennefer doesn’t stay to hear whatever else he’s going to say, turning on her heel and stalking out of the room.

Later, she’ll reason: they have loving Jaskier in common, and that’s something significant enough in itself, more than a sufficient explanation for-

For anything.

And later still:

Only Yennefer will be there when Jaskier awakes, the next afternoon, and even as he’s blinking, she doesn’t waste any time in chiding him.

“You decided to go find a djinn without me?” she asks, not nearly as harsh as she means to me, too happy at seeing his eyes finally open. “Dumbshit.”

“You have the bedside manner of a rabid goblin,” Jaskier bitches sleepily, which is how Yennefer knows that he’s alright, even though he moves to sit up and groans, clutching at his ribs. “Ah, fuck my life, everything hurts.”

“Don’t be dramatic.” Yennefer pins him back down, one-handed, and Jaskier huffs a miserable laugh.

“It’s like you don’t even know me.”

Yennefer doesn’t dignify that with a response, just curls up next to him and lets him nestle his head against her shoulder. It’s only then, with him awake and warm at her side, that she fully relaxes for the first time since he showed up unconscious and covered in his own blood.

He could have died. He could have died like the thousands of pointless, undignified humans that die every day, and his magic wouldn’t have made a difference and Yennefer wouldn’t have been there to do a thing about it.

“Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?” she blurts, mostly a whisper into his hair. She’s not brave enough to look him in the eye as she asks it.

“I thought,” Jaskier starts, then makes a sound like he’s trying to laugh at himself, to make a joke of it. It doesn’t quite work. “I thought, you know, library books told me nothing, and my magic can’t help you, but perhaps a djinn’s could.”

“Help me,” Yen echoes, not following his train of thought. What she wants, she gets herself – she doesn’t recall ever mentioning a djinn. “Help me with what?”

“You know,” Jaskier wheedles, then reaches his arm across the scant distance between them, taps a finger over her stomach. No- not her stomach, Yennefer realizes.

_Years_ ago, multiple bloody _decades_ ago, she mentioned wanting children, to him. She assumed he’d forgotten, or was glossing over it in favour of happier things, like he does when he’s talking about his own past.

“Idiot,” Yennefer says harshly, when she can finally speak. She’s gripping his hand tight enough that it must hurt, tight enough that it will leave bruises. She’s not sure when she grabbed it.

Jaskier laces their fingers, squeezes back. “Yeah, love you too,” he says, casual as anything. Like it’s a matter of course that he would nearly get himself killed trying to wrangle ancient and notoriously dangerous magics to help her have the family she wants.

Not for the first time, Yennefer feels overwhelmed, out of her depth entirely when faced with the enormity of Jaskier’s feelings, his capacity for caring and caring openly, at that. How unjust she is, how unimaginably greedy, to want more of him than he already freely gives to her. To feel hard done by in the slightest by his lack of romantic interest when she has so much of him, even at his own expense.

He’s her best friend. She’s his, which means, just- everything.

“Your human loves you back,” Yennefer says, drawing back to meet Jaskier’s eyes and trying for a smile.

He goes slightly pink. It’s adorable, totally and utterly, in defiance of all other, less embarrassing adjectives. “Stop.”

“He does,” Yennefer presses on, touching her nose to his, playful, and whispering, “And he’s not subtle about it either, you’re both pathetic.”

Jaskier looks at her like he thinks she’s lying; seeing that she’s not, he laughs out loud, presses their foreheads closer and looks so blissfully and utterly _happy,_ all because of his Geralt, that whatever bitterness Yennefer was clinging to crumbles like sand. Jaskier is alive. Jaskier is in love and content. She can tolerate the rest.

Besides: Human lifetimes are short. She’ll just… wait this out. Geralt of Rivia will die soon enough.

So. Maybe not _all_ of her bitterness is quite gone.

(Wait it out, Yennefer thinks, and somewhere in a distant memory, the old witcher smirks at her, and destiny does too.

_No easy outs, girl.)_


	3. Chapter 3

Even aside from her objections to the whole ‘taking children and brutally mutating them, damning them to either a painful death or a life of social ostracization’, Yennefer reflects as she hikes up the mountain, she would have become fed up with the typical life of a witcher long ago. Nature is pleasant to look at from the window of a comfortable castle or carriage. Significantly less pleasant when your shoes are sinking into the dirt with every step and you know the only meal you’ll be getting will be dried rations from your pack.

“Fucking- mosquitos-” she says aloud, swatting at them as she tries to keep to something resembling a path. This, this is what happens when she lets Jaskier fill her head with his bullshit about heroes, and ‘a worthy cause, Yen’, and ‘Yen, imagine the _songs_ ’. Next she knows she’ll start on about doing the right thing and rescuing damsels or some other utter horseshit.

She pauses, leans against the nearest tree to flick another insect off of her ankle when the familiar gasping brightness of a portal appears a few metres ahead of her.

“About time,” she says, once Jaskier and – ugh – Geralt tumble out. “Did you stop for drinks on your way to get him?”

“I figured your personality would ward off any danger in the meanwhile,” Jaskier shoots back, and softens his words with a kiss to the top of Yennefer’s head, which she allows only because Geralt is watching and she’s not above gloating.

“Farm boy,” Yennefer acknowledges him with a nod which Geralt returns, accompanied by a grunt that Yennefer can only assume is a greeting.

“We probably _should_ have stopped for drinks,” Jaskier contemplates aloud, leaving Geralt to shoulder both of their packs, along with the old, battered sword already strapped to his back. “I mean, the wilderness is useful for metaphor and the occasional dramatic painting, but on the whole it’s generally disgusting, isn’t it? Certainly more tolerable if we had stopped at a tavern and gotten ourselves plastered first.”

“Classy, Jaskier,” Yennefer says, shoving her own pack at him. He takes it without complaining.

“You’ve got a bug bite on your nose, it’s quite swollen-”

Geralt punches his shoulder before Yennefer can. She very determinedly does not look at him. Gets the distinct impression that Geralt is purposefully not looking at her as well. Three is always more complicated.

“Make sure your human keeps up,” she tells Jaskier, then starts walking again, leaving the two of them to match her pace.

It’s rumours that have brought them out here in the height of summer. Convincing, persistent rumours, but rumours nonetheless. People talk of a last living dragon, and on bandits set on pillaging its hoard. Yennefer wouldn’t mind a go at a dragon’s treasure herself, actually, but Jaskier got it in his head that it would be a noble cause, and apparently she and Geralt both are shit at refusing him when he gets passionate about something.

“You don’t hear about pillaging as much as you used to, in the old days,” Jaskier prattles, conversational, as they forge their way up the mountain. “It was all pillaging, back then. Wall to wall pillaging.”

“Like you would know about pillaging,” Yennefer says, because the day she passes up a chance to mock Jaskier is the day she loses the power of speech. “Had you ever even left your cozy taverns and classrooms before meeting me?”

“Unwarranted slander, Yennefer, I’ll have you know that I _also_ frequented many a bedchamber, so there.”

She looks over at him incredulously. “What does that prove, exactly?”

“Uh, have you ever fucked a knight?” Jaskier steps nimbly over a protruding tree root. “No concept of appropriate pillow talk, it’s as good a means of learning about pillaging as any.”

“Pillaging what, exactly?” Yennefer says, and Geralt snorts, a sound that Yennefer thinks is supposed to be a laugh. She’s mostly been trying to forget he’s here.

“Oh, don’t you start,” Jaskier points a finger at him, sounding mortally offended and clearly enjoying himself immensely. “You, who’s never even left your village.”

“I’ve left my village,” Geralt counters, then adds, as if an afterthought, “Once.”

“Going to market doesn’t count, Geralt,” Jaskier says, bratty, and Geralt shoots him a look but doesn’t elaborate, so his one-time-only excursion from the village must not have been anything impressive.

Somewhere behind them, a twig snaps.

Less than a minute, Yennefer was distracted. Still a minute too long: a man emerges from behind a tree, scowling and wielding a spiked club. He’s flanked on either side by another, and each of them is flanked the same. Using all of her senses now, too late, Yennefer can see at least thirty of them, can hear more lurking in the brush. So much for bandits – these are practically a militia.

She unsheathes her sword, hears Geralt do the same.

“Might need to save the songwriting ‘til later,” Yennefer says, dry, as she scans the horde around them, identifying weak points. There aren’t many.

Jaskier is already rolling up his sleeves. “Your lack of faith in my multitasking ability is insulting, truly.”

They step back, corralled into the centre of a circle of bandits, Geralt in between them.

“Don’t get in our way,” she warns him without taking her eyes off of the advancing enemies.

“Do my best,” Geralt says, then proceeds to charge forward and take out the four nearest bandits in as many seconds.

Yennefer gapes.

Jaskier grins at her, ever so smug, then strums on his lute, making Yennefer’s medallion hum as he sends out an arc of magical sound that sends the attackers stumbling backwards, disoriented. Yennefer lunges ahead to take advantage.

The bandits are not trained fighters, but they are experienced, the sort of men used to risking life and limb for coin. More the pity for them: Yennefer cuts through them, her sword in one hand and her knife in another, both bloodsoaked in seconds. In a way, fighting multiple enemies is easier than fighting only one – less time for thinking, just trusting her senses, the way she hears a blade slicing through the air the moment before it reaches her, time enough to parry and jam her knife through the man’s breastbone, splitting it messily. Jaskier is cursing out the bandits, their families, and their home villages, dancing out of the way of blows and playing a song on his lute that has vines springing up from the ground, wrapping themselves around legs; on Yennefer’s right, Geralt is wielding his sword with raw strength, dispatching the bandits more slowly than she is, but steadily. The three of them wind up standing as a triangle, their backs together.

“Where the fuck did you learn to fight, farm boy?” Yennefer demands, rearing back and kicking one of the dozen remaining bandits where it’ll hurt.

“Sometimes people try to steal horses,” Geralt says, matter of fact, then, “Duck,” and swings his sword over Yennefer’s head, permanently incapacitating the man charging at her.

It’s an easier fight than it has any right to be, the three of them fighting in harmony. Feels almost like dancing, and even after, when they’re all sweaty and disgusting and traipsing down to a stream to make an attempt at cleaning up, Yennefer can’t shake the feeling of- of satisfaction, bone deep, like something slotting into place.

The water is clear and sun-speckled, burbling invitingly as they approach. Geralt doesn’t hesitate to tug his shirt off, making a pleased sound to be rid of the bloodstained, ruined material. He somehow looks even larger half-naked like this, all sharply defined muscle and a trail of hair disappearing under his belt.

Jaskier has given up on unlacing his deeply impractical doublet in favour of blatantly ogling Geralt, and Yennefer- she looks.

It doesn’t _mean_ anything. She can objectively appreciate his physique, that’s all, in a supportive sort of way, since Jaskier likes him so much and he did probably save her life once or twice today.

Geralt, either oblivious to being objectified or used to it, balls up his shirt, tossing it safely onto the shore. “Lady Yennefer,” he says, polite as he has been every time he’s addressed her. Yennefer raises an eyebrow, focuses on his face with considerable effort.

“Hm?”

“Do mages dissolve in water?”

Yennefer picks up where he’s leading immediately. “I don’t believe they do, no.”

“Geralt,” Jaskier says, catching on after a delayed moment and pointing commandingly. “Geralt of Rivia, I am an extremely powerful ageless being that’s existed longer than many cities, don’t you dare-”

The rest of his rant is derailed by Geralt scooping him up and heaving him directly into the water, doublet and all.

“What was that, grandpa?” Geralt says, innocent, giving as much of a smile as Yennefer’s ever seen from him, and Jaskier narrows his eyes, waves a hand so that a jet of water shoots out and knocks Geralt onto his ass.

“ _Grandpa_ , he says, the absolute _audacity_ -” And he’s cut off again by another splash from Geralt, at which point the both of them devolve into play-wrestling like children, laughing and spluttering when either gets dunked underwater.

It does something to Yennefer’s heart, watching the two of them. Makes her freeze where she stands, unwilling to move and fracture the moment, because she might not understand the appeal of humans to Jaskier, but she thinks she sees just a glimmer of it now, watching him fling himself about in his underthings with his farm boy. And that’s what they look like, _boys_ , the happiness of them nearly blinding.

“Yen,” Jaskier spits out a mouthful of water, looking at her with shining eyes. “Yennefer, we should go to the coast!”

“What, so you can get thrown in an actual ocean?” Yennefer says, but she can’t not laugh at the sight of him, and she catches Geralt’s eyes, doesn’t bother schooling her face. He perhaps understands that a smile from her is a thing rarely earned and even more rarely given, because he just gives a slight nod, as if in understanding, then tugs Jaskier down again, looks pleased when Jaskier leans back against him, laughing too hard to stand.

“Join us?” he calls to her, and Yennefer hesitates.

There’s a world in which today, the three of them on this mountain, ends terribly. This world isn’t that one.

“Alright,” Yennefer says, and she joins them in the water, and it is.

\---

The pleasant thing about having another friend is that it – friendship – is easier the second time around. Yennefer knows what it is to be known, now, and finds that she doesn’t mind it. Something about practice making perfect, perhaps, and maybe in that spirit, she spars with Geralt in the field behind his house, only barely holds back her full strength and enjoys showing off swordplay she rarely gets to use in a real fight.

“I haven’t dueled with anyone for fun in years,” she informs him one day, a few months after the mountain, spinning out from one of his brutal strikes. It’s the closest thing she has to fond memories of her time at Kaer Morhen, sparring with Lambert and watching him pout like a child every time she bested him.

“Is that what you do,” Geralt asks, panting, “when you’re learning to be a witcher?”

“I’m not-” Yennefer begins to say, then bites her lip. Something about Geralt, maybe the matter-of-fact way he says things, makes him difficult to lie to. Makes her not want to. “How?”

He understands the unspoken rest of the question, _how do you know_ , because no one living except for Jaskier and other witchers know what she is. Geralt taps his chest without lowering his sword, and Yennefer copies the gesture, lifting her hand to her own chest, where she finds her medallion hanging openly. It must have fallen loose from where she always has it tucked and bound against her, under her shirts.

“Any reason in particular you were looking at my chest?” Yennefer asks, wry. Teasing, maybe. Flirting, deniably.

Geralt gives her a look, like _really,_ as they continue circling each other _._ Some pathetic, normally-latent girl deep inside of Yennefer, who is the sort still able to enjoy being looked at by someone she wants to look at, thrills. She knows she is beautiful. She likes Geralt of Rivia acknowledging it, in his tacit way. The rest of Yennefer silences that girl forcefully.

“You’re also a head shorter than me and can put me on my ass, that was also a clue,” Geralt says. Back into safe territory.

“Don’t feel too bad,” Yennefer says,. “I can put anyone on their-”

Her focus lapses for a second. Half that. Not enough for any human to make any kind of sword maneuver against her, not with her reflexes, but just barely enough for Geralt to barrel into her, shoulder down, knocking her to the ground and rolling back to his feet.

“Fucker.” Yennefer splashes mud up at him, can’t quite bring herself to be angry. Geralt is grinning down at her as he wipes his face, obviously pleased with himself to have bested her, even if it took over an hour’s worth of attempts. “If you’re going to call me a mutant freak, do it now.”

“Couldn’t, Jaskier would never speak to me again,” Geralt says, frankly, then extends a hand to help her up.

Yennefer yanks him down instead so he lands face-first in the mud, and they continue their fight, and if she was concerned about Geralt acting differently now that he knows she’s a witcher, it passes quickly.

“I told you he was wonderful,” Jaskier gloats, once, and only once, because Yennefer curses him out so thoroughly after he does. Just because he was right doesn’t mean she plans on admitting it. It’s just-

It’s _nice_ , having someone to tease Jaskier with, or to look amused when either of them says something especially witty. She can see why Geralt is attractive to Jaskier, his opposite in every way except for a shared idealism that Geralt is only marginally better at hiding.

For all that Geralt grumbles and makes faces, he clearly adores Jaskier, and Yennefer can see that, too. It’s immediately, glaringly obvious, the way he brightens whenever Jaskier enters the room, the way he sighs but never once moves away when Jaskier leans against him or touches his arm or sits with his legs flung across Geralt’s lap. Yennefer likes listening to the two of them bickering, or, rather, to Jaskier bickering and Geralt making an occasional noise of disagreement that’s usually enough to get Jaskier flustered all over again and monologuing indignantly for another ten minutes.

Sometimes, Yennefer feels stricken with jealousy, sharp and stinging. More often, she thinks- _at last_ , years of watching the person she loves miserable and finally he’s being loved the way he deserves.

“There’s a song there, somewhere, don’t you think?” Jaskier says, one evening when the three of them are sat around a campfire. “‘A witcher, a sorcerer, and a human walk into a bar’; it’s either a comedy or a horribly gory and fateful tragedy, I haven’t decided yet.”

“I swear, if you start on about destiny-”

“Nah, doesn’t exist,” Jaskier waves her off.

“He’s the authority on it,” Geralt intones, dry, and doesn’t bother looking guilty when Jaskier makes a rude gesture at him and Yennefer bites back a smile.

She still returns to her manor houses and cities and beautiful things, but finds herself, more and more, accompanying Jaskier when he returns to the farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, population: Geralt. She’s eager about it, too, which is an entirely new sort of masochism.

“D’you think,” she asks, scraping her hair out of the way while Jaskier lavishes kisses upon her collarbone, hopelessly distracting as she tries to open the door. “D’you think Geralt would just absolutely die with envy if he saw you like this with me?”

“Humility prevents me from answering that question,” Jaskier murmurs against her skin, and Yennefer is already reaching for his belt once the door swings open. She laughs at the ludicrous suggestion of Jaskier possessing even a scrap of humility, but the sound is breathless – she can imagine Geralt watching them, eyes black with lust, can picture the way Jaskier would put on even more of a show than he usually does. He’s always loved having more than one person’s hands on him.

“You’re not still waiting to fuck him,” Yennefer says, a thought only just occurring to her, then, when Jaskier very purposefully tugs at her bodice instead of answering, “ _Jaskier.”_

“I know, I know.”

“I can't believe you still haven't kissed him,” Yennefer teases, when she and Jaskier are half-out of their clothes, stumbling into the study of their apartments. “Your reputation is at stake.”

“I will,” Jaskier says, lifting Yennefer onto his desk – she flicks papers out of the way and ignores the inconvenient mix of irritation and arousal and the thought of him kissing Geralt – and bending down obediently when she tugs him in to kiss him again. “I will, I’m just- figuring things out, it’s complicated.”

Yennefer bites his lip, draws back just enough to look at him, disbelieving. “What could there possibly be to figure out?” And it’s light, joking, because she’s quite good at it by now, at wanting what she can’t have twice over and pretending not to, but Jaskier falters.

“Don’t be cruel, Yen,” he says. The seriousness of it catches Yennefer off guard, and Jaskier must be able to see that, because he gives his head a little shake as if clearing his mind, then offers a crooked smile. “And,” he says, only a tad too deliberately, “and, I’ll have you know, my reputation as a lover is both in-tact and entirely well earned.”

“Mm, you should probably prove it,” Yennefer dares, and Jaskier kisses her again, makes quick work of the laces of her dress, and that’s the end of it, she thinks, until later, when they’re sprawled out on the bed. Yennefer’s got her head on Jaskier’s chest, and she’s listening to his heart, letting the sound lull her to sleep while he plays with her hair, the way he always does.

“Have you ever been in love?” Jaskier asks, apropos of nothing. Quietly enough, pensive enough that it almost sounds as though he’s talking to himself.

 _With you, idiot_ , Yennefer doesn’t say. _And with your not-boyfriend, apparently._

“I’ll let you know if it happens,” she does, and Jaskier’s hand stills in her hair as if he means to say something, but only for a moment, and then he moves again, and neither says anything more.

\---

The last time that things change, or begin to change, involves, like at least half of the time that she and Jaskier spend together, the two of them almost dying.

The hail of arrows from above – another ambush, humans are getting smarter and less preoccupied with trifles like honour – misses their vital organs, at least.

“Any time now,” Yennefer grunts, parrying away another arrow with her sword in one hand, while the other is clutching her side where one skinned her. The blood is seeping through her shirt.

“Patience, patience,” Jaskier has time to quip, and Yennefer shoves his head down to make him duck while a new volley comes. “And- go, go-”

They charge into the portal blindly, emerging at a run inside of Geralt’s house. The space is small, confined – Yennefer barely stops herself in time to avoid skidding into the table, and Jaskier doesn’t, sends a plate crashing to the floor.

The place is dark, the fireplace barely emitting a glow. Geralt, who must have been in bed, springs to his feet as they appear, though he doesn’t shout in shock or fear, which perhaps says something unflattering, Yennefer reflects, about the fact that they’ve gotten him so accustomed to two murderous non-mortals appearing magically on his property.

“You two couldn’t wait ‘til morning?” he asks, blinking sleep out of his eyes, and Yennefer scoffs then winces at the pain in her side. Jaskier waves a hand, and a ball of light hovers by the ceiling, illuminating the room.

Now that he can see the state of them, Geralt’s shock makes an appearance. He crosses the room, at Jaskier’s side at once, and lays a hand on his back, looking him up and down. “Who hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” Jaskier says, dodging out of the way.

“You don’t look fine-”

“Geralt,” Jaskier catches him, a hand on his arm; manages to look bemused as well as exhausted. “I’m fine, I was only the distraction, help Yen.”

“ _Yen_ doesn’t need your help, actually,” Yennefer says, though she undercuts her point by teetering unsteadily on her feet. Geralt is next to her before she can catch her balance, getting a careful arm around her to help her over to the still-slightly-askew table.

“Sit,” he tells her, and the order is blunted enough with obvious concern that, touched, Yennefer listens.

“Melitele’s _tits_ , that was awful,” Jaskier complains, collapsing into Geralt’s one rickety chair and lolling his head back, yawning.

“Here,” Geralt says, and Yennefer turns her attention back to him. He’s holding a handful of thin strips of cloth, and Yennefer didn’t hear him ripping them, which means that he already had them ready, which means, because she’s known him enough to know that his life sans-them is generally non-dangerous, that he got them ready for-

For Jaskier. Of course, for Jaskier. Her luck, as Jaskier’s friend, to benefit.

“Would you,” Geralt says, nodding pointedly at her side.

“Ah, and he’s a gentleman, too,” Yennefer deadpans, and manages not to wince as she lifts her shirt, tucking her arms up as well so Geralt can start to bandage the wound. Even perched on the table, he’s a lot taller than she is, which is in itself not unusual, but he’s standing closer than usual, making the disparity more pronounced, and that in combination with the way that he carefully wraps her injured side, slow and fastidious, makes Yennefer’s mouth feel suddenly dry.

The back of his hand brushes her ribs – accidentally, she knows, because his cheeks go slightly pink when it happens – as he secures the end of the bandage. Yennefer can already feel herself healing, the skin knitting back together where it was torn, but the warmth of the touch makes her wish, nonsensically, that she was hurt just slightly worse.

“Here,” Geralt says again, and leaves her side, but only goes far enough to retrieve a pail of water from near the door, carrying it over and setting it down on the table next to her. Yennefer dips her hands in, moves to scrub them, and tenses at the way it tugs at her side. Geralt must notice, because he makes a small sound of consternation then takes a step closer and, submerging his hands with hers, begins to wash off the half-dried blood from her skin.

Under the quickly darkening surface of the water, he taps her ring, a question, _should I take this off._ Yennefer shakes her head, and Geralt doesn’t question her or push – he never does, unless she does first – just keeps cleaning.

He turns her hand over to rub at her palm with his thumb, and in doing so, the scars on her wrist become visible. Like her eyes, the glamour has never managed to make them disappear.

Yennefer stiffens, feels Geralt’s eyes flicker to hers and braces for cloying sympathy or disbelieving condescension. Instead, he squeezes her hand in his, a silent kind of companionship, of seeing. _Kind_ , Yennefer thinks, the way she often does, around him and about him.

She curls her fingers around one of his and Geralt lets her do it. It’s a chaste, nothing touch, the merest suggestion of holding hands, but it feels like a kiss, like breathing each other’s air, and then Yennefer hears a sharp exhale from the other side of the room and her blood runs cold.

Jaskier is watching her and Geralt, has been watching, and as Yennefer turns, their eyes meet, and Jaskier’s brow creases. A hundred possible conversations and excuses and arguments flicker through Yennefer’s mind and splinter into nothing, unsaid. Unnecessary – they speak each other fluently, by now.

Yennefer pulls her hand out from Geralt’s, sharply.

The blood is long since washed from her hands, but she feels marked anyways, irascibly, as she forces herself to her feet. She doesn’t say anything to him – to either of them, what could she say? – before making a break for the door and out into the night.

She doesn’t go far. Doesn’t think she’s capable of it, now, just walks and then runs as far as she can into the field before she comes to the boundary, where she sits down in the grass, slumping back against the wooden slat fence. She feels the way she does coming out of a fight or narrowly escaping one, her heart in her throat. She wants to blame her injuries. Can’t, even to herself.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there under the stars, not thinking, not daring to, until she hears Jaskier approaching. He followed. He always follows.

He sits down next to her, tucking his legs in. For once he doesn’t complain about the mud.

“You love him,” Jaskier says. It isn’t a question.

Yennefer looks at him. Doesn’t say anything, doesn’t insult them both by trying to deny it. _I love you_ , she swallows from the tip of her tongue.

Jaskier glances up at the sky then back at her, and the look on his face is inscrutable. “Were you going to tell me?”

Yennefer answers, this time. “No. Of course not.”

Jaskier laughs. It’s an awful sound, ragged and ugly and nothing like him at all. “You spend how many decades giving me massive piles of shit for liking humans, and then you fall for mine,” he says, half to himself, by the sounds of it. He looks torn between laughing again and being distraught.

“Jaskier,” Yennefer says, pained, but he’s shaking his head, so she waits for him to speak. He doesn’t, not for a long time.

“He’s easy to love, isn’t he?” he says, eventually, quietly.

“Not like us,” Yennefer agrees, and they’re just staring at each other. Yennefer can feel a gulf between them that has never been there before, not once since they met. Somewhere in the field, a cricket is singing.

Jaskier exhales, long and, Yennefer thinks, not as steady as he means it to be. “Shall we fight about it?” he asks, like he wants to be joking.

“I’d win,” Yennefer says, and she wants to be joking too, but-

“Yeah,” Jaskier says, staring down at the grass, trampled at their feet.

 _Yeah_ , Yennefer thinks hysterically. Her hands feel bloodstained. Jaskier doesn’t reach out to hold them. “I'm-”

“Don’t say sorry,” he stops her in her tracks, and Yennefer hears it as the hand on his other side clenches, tearing up a few blades of grass. “Don’t say sorry for loving someone el- for loving someone, you’re my best friend, I’m not that selfish.”

“Jaskier,” Yennefer says again, uselessly. She knows anger, sarcasm, scathing wit and occasional bloodlust. Not guilt. She doesn’t know what to do with this. She did nothing. She _can_ do nothing, here.

Jaskier swallows, hard. His tongue darts out to wet his lips. He sounds, when he speaks, as though it’s taking immense effort to sound normal. “Yennefer of Vengerberg,” he says, with a sad smile, “you’re breaking my heart.”

It is, for once, not Jaskier putting on his normal dramatics. It’s honest, achingly so, and it means that Yennefer is every ounce the monster people once called her, to be capable of hurting someone she loves so badly.

He thinks she’s taking Geralt from him. It’s obvious, he thinks that Yennefer is going to swoop in and want and take the way she always does, and- and she would, usually, without regretting it, but it’s not just Geralt, it’s the both of them, she wants-

She’s been fooling herself. She’s been entertaining the hopeless fiction that she could fit herself into the space between Jaskier and his Geralt, that she could be _wanted_ there and somehow belong, selfish enough to – if not have their love, at least have their friendship, at least have _them_.

She’s been so stupid. Yennefer realizes it now, the truth sinking inside her like a stone. She was stupid to plan on waiting out Geralt of Rivia, because he’s too good to deserve that, too much in love with Jaskier, and Jaskier won’t be happy without him; and she was stupid to want to be part of them, because Jaskier doesn’t love her like that.

 _Jaskier_ , she thinks, and wants to reach for him, to curl into her side and breathe him in. _My Jaskier._

She cannot, will not be the cause of his pain. Jaskier’s heart isn’t hers, but it’s hers to protect, and Yennefer resolves it, then and there: she will not be the one to hurt him. Not over this, not even if it means making a martyr of her own heart, because Jaskier- Jaskier is her friend, her only friend for most of her life, and she knows how much love means to him.

Geralt will get over whatever passing flirtation she and he had, and be happy with Jaskier, make Jaskier happy in return and that’s it, end of story.

Yennefer has always been good at leaving.

She does.

\---

She lived multiple lifetimes’ worth of years without Geralt of Rivia in any of them, and so it follows logically that it should be, she reasons, a simple enough matter to go back to that.

Yennefer does not return to Rivia, not to anywhere within fifty miles of Rivia, after that night in the field. She’s never been the sort of person to grow attached to places, but she finds herself missing the sturdy little farmhouse even still, the lingering smell of dewy grass, the sounds of Jaskier radiating happiness every time she and Geralt got along.

 _Stupid_ , she scolds herself. Delusional, at best.

She doesn’t let herself dwell, or tries not to. She returns to her task of killing monstrous men with a renewed vigour, draws out the chase so she can smell their fear, gorges herself on their riches. She takes what she wants, the way that she has for as much of her life as she can readily remember, a life that has been, to her best efforts, within her control. Want, take, have, that’s how it goes.

How it went.

It’s entirely foreign to her, this experience of actively depriving herself of what – who – she wants. She _could_ go to Geralt, and she _could_ kiss him and leave scratches down his back while he fucked her, she _could,_ she longs to, but she doesn’t, even as the wanting leaves her sleepless and miserable, because her getting what she wants would mean hurting Jaskier.

Even his name hurts.

“Lady Yennefer,” one of the servants, broom in hand, greets her as she walks by. “Where’s your bard, today?”

“I can’t imagine that’s any of your concern,” Yennefer says, without stopping or glancing back. Once she’s within her rooms, she bolts the door, leans against it for a long moment, then, finding the cool touch of the wood unhelpful in calming her mind upon hearing mention of Jaskier, wheels around, takes off one of her shoes, and flings it at the nearest mirror. The glass shatters. Satisfying, but only for a second. Still, her blood thunders in her ears.

She didn’t intend to avoid Jaskier, at first. Didn’t even think she knew how, because he’s been at her side for more of her life than she ever lived without him, but the first time that it occurred to her to seek him out after leaving him with Geralt, she froze in her tracks.

 _You’re breaking my heart_ , he told her, clear as anything. He wanted Geralt, and he did not want and does not want her, at least not the way she desperately wants him to. And Yennefer is under no illusions: she knows that he’ll feel hurt by her leaving. She’s his best friend. But he’ll have his Geralt, and the hurt will turn into anger or indifference, and he’ll write a petty song about her and be done with it.

If Yennefer lets herself come face to face with him, she’ll say something. She’ll confess something he doesn’t want to hear and she’ll ruin his happiness, so she just. Doesn’t.

She misses him. She misses him when she sinks into a lilac scented bath, and when the bard at a banquet plays _The Violet Eyed Maiden,_ and when a tavern full of rowdy humans talks of the possibility of war between Nilfgaard and Cintra and the difference of ideals between them. Yennefer feels as helpless as they are, completely powerless by choice. Made weak by her wanting.

For the first time since she left a century and a half ago, Yennefer winters at Kaer Morhen. The journey is worse than she remembered, as close to a distraction as she’s had since losing Jaskier and Geralt, though still natural to her like something her body has kept all this time.

The others saw her coming, or heard: they’re lounging around by the massive doors when Yennefer arrives at the keep, clearly awaiting her.

“Yenna’s back,” Eskel announces, offering her a grin and a nod as she approaches. He doesn’t look like he’s held on to any sour feelings from their last parting, though it’s a distinct possibility that he’s maybe just enjoying the disaster that is Lambert bounding up to Yen and dragging her into a headlock, utterly ruining her hair.

“Not too good for us anymore, eh, little sister?”

“I’m older than you, shit for brains,” Yennefer retorts, and spins out of his grip, digs her nails into his arm until he lets her go, cursing at her in a mostly-friendly way.

The keep is remarkably unchanged, considering the intervening decades since Yennefer was last here. Still stone passages, patches of warmth near hearths and bitter cold everywhere in between. She wanders the halls, reacquainting herself. Imagines the life she could have – should have? – had, spending the year taking contracts and retreating here when the weather turned to recount her stories before heading off alone again. She wonders if she could still do it, be a proper witcher, get rid of feelings and attachments and the hopeless and faintly humiliating longing to be loved. No self-sacrifice necessary, because there would be no desires _to_ sacrifice.

It could be a relief, she thinks.

She can’t decide if it’s empowering or a pathetic attempt to prove herself superior to what she once was when she enters Vesemir’s quarters after only a knock. Not that it matters: he’s sat over by a small window, and scarcely glances at her when she crosses the threshold. He clearly knew she was coming. They make an annoying habit of that, here.

Yennefer perches on the window’s ledge, looking her old instructor over with some curiosity. Witchers age infinitesimally, but the accumulation of years has managed to wear its way onto his face, in lines at the corners of his eyes, grey hair where there once was black.

He’s clearly studying her as well. “That’s not your face,” he says, inscrutably. Perhaps disapprovingly.

“It is,” Yennefer says. “It is mine. I chose it.” She hates how plaintive she sounds, is instantly chiding herself for speaking so forcefully.

Vesemir just gives her a hard look. “Why’re you back here?”

Yennefer shrugs, hugging her knees. “Self-imposed exile.”

It elicits a bemused snort from the old witcher. “Always were one for dramatics,” he says, then, before Yennefer can retort, “Are you staying?”

She forces herself to sound distant, uninterested. She’s quite good at it by now. “Is this an invitation?”

Vesemir makes another face. “This isn’t your home anymore,” he says, flat. “Never really was.”

This place is where Yennefer learned what pain is. Still, somehow, even after everything, she manages to feel betrayed at Vesemir’s words. She hasn’t been here in over a century, hasn’t spoken to him in longer, but he’s the closest thing she’s ever had to a father, and he’s telling her that she’s unwelcome here. For all her wanting, she has nothing, nothing.

“Perfect,” she spits, halfway to her feet already. “Thank you for absolutely fuck all-”

“Sit down, girl,” Vesemir cuts her off, faintly amusedly. “You’d never in your life be happy here and you know it, or have the years changed you inside as well as out?” He raises one unkempt eyebrow at her, and Yennefer scowls, but sits back down. Few things are worse than knowing someone is right when you’d rather they weren’t. The years _have_ changed Yennefer, in more ways than she can count, some for the better and some for the worst and some to the point of agony. Not enough to content her with staying here.

Moments pass, the world still around them, during which they both stare out at the peaks and valleys in the distance, at the clouds near-obscuring them from view. Eventually, Vesemir lets out a long sigh.

“You don’t walk our Path,” he says, slowly, gruffly. “But you walk yours.” A shrug of a shoulder, still not looking toward her. “Some wolves start a pack. I suppose it doesn’t make them less a wolf.”

It’s as much comfort as Yennefer will get from him; from Vesemir, with his _no easy outs_ , it’s even a kindness. Practically a warm hug. She knows it is, and so it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth when she has to shake her head, no.

“You’re wrong,” she says, dull. “I have no pack.”

Vesemir looks at her, finally, and his gaze softens almost imperceptibly. “Only giving a shit about people can make you this miserable.”

Still right. Still annoying.

Yennefer stays sitting by the window long after Vesemir retreats into the rest of the keep, long past when the sounds of laughter and smells of plain but well-made fare find their way to her from in the dining hall. It’s cold by the window, a few snowflakes drifting past here and there, but her cloak is finely made, and she’s hardier than she makes herself be, as a rule.

She lays a hand against her chest, where she can just barely make out the outline of her medallion through her layers, worn all this time and ignored except when forced to do otherwise. She supposes she’s fond of it, in the vaguely hateful, inevitable way you become fond of something when it’s all but a part of you. They made her something broken and twisted and hideous, when they made her into the person with this medallion. They made her strong, too. She doesn’t know if she’s a witcher or a woman or anything, anymore, but she knows she’s strong.

Yennefer’s fingers tighten around the medallion without her intending them to, so the wolf presses into her palm. She imagines that it will leave an imprint. What’s one more, she thinks, drily.

This isn’t her home. This is a place where she learned to be something that she spent her whole life trying to leave behind. Even elsewhere in the world, armed with near-endless time and more riches than anyone could need, she has no shortage of houses, cozy apartments and rich manors and places that would be honoured to host her as a guest, but no home.

 _Some wolves start a pack_ , Vesemir said, and in spite of herself, Yennefer’s mind corrects her previous statement: she has no home except-

Yennefer exhales. Watches the crystal cloud of her breath appear and disappear in front of her.

She left here for wanting once before. She supposes that practice makes perfect.

She doesn’t stop to say goodbye before leaving for home, and she doesn’t look back.

\---

The city of students and performers, on the eve of its annual end of term festivities, has grown in prestige and population, but remains, on the whole, a fucking cesspool.

It might say something about humans, Yennefer thinks, that in the near-century since she first visited Oxenfurt at summer’s beginning, their means of celebrating haven’t markedly changed. There are still jubilant students laughing off exam stress by consuming copious amounts of cheap alcohol, still garishly coloured pennants hung from windows and criss-crossing the streets.

No one gives Yennefer a second look. It’s dark enough to preempt any violet-eyed maiden references, and even if it weren’t she’s dressed simply, unarmed to the extent that a witcher ever is. She knows she still looks young like this, with her hair down and unadorned, without any colour on her lips. No one calls her Lady, tonight. The way she wants it.

“First time in the city, dearie?” asks a friendly, red-haired woman when Yennefer brushes past her on her way toward the main square. The crowd is nearly overflowing, even on this side street.

“No,” Yennefer says, then, “Sort of. Do you know where I can get a good view?”

The woman grins, gestures upwards with her chin. Yennefer follows her gaze and sees the people clustered on balconies or leaning out of windows, looking easily over the masses.

“Thank you,” she says, but the woman has vanished into the crowd, kindness safely dispatched.

The performance is already underway by the time Yennefer navigates the packed streets and the campus of the Academy, making her way up the stairs and into Jaskier’s apartments in the instructors’ quarters.

She runs a hand along the expensive fabrics as she passes, feels as though she walks in a memory.

The music from the performance in the square, a muffled beat as she moved through the apartments, comes into full bloom as Yennefer emerges onto the balcony. It’s magically more spacious than it ought to be, same as the rest of Jaskier’s quarters; plenty of room for her to sit comfortably on the railing, swinging her legs over the side.

From this height and this distance, even with her enhanced senses, the musicians are little more than brightly coloured, noisy little specks. There are perhaps a dozen of them in a cleared out semi-circle at one end of the crowd, all playing together in turns. A trumpeter picks up the memory, a joyful, clamorous thing, when the lyrist leaves off, and other partygoers dance in the patches of open space, the whole thing overlaid with a drumbeat like a heart.

Even in the crowd of other bards, Jaskier has a way of catching the eye. He always has.

The crowd grows noticeably louder as he takes his turn with the song, a blue-clad figure playing to his audience, twirling an old woman into a dance and singing along once his turn with the instrumental has ended. Everyone he passes reaches for him, as if drawn in by the force of his personality. The sight stirs something complicated in Yennefer’s chest. He’s famous as her companion, of course, but it’s very evident tonight that he’s known in his own right as well, especially here amongst the young bards-in-training who dream of being like him, as if anyone could come close.

Yennefer watches from her vantage point on the balcony as Jaskier finishes the song, then, at the requests of the audience and his fellow performers, a few of his own most popular ballads. She hums along, joins in the applause when he finally manages to escape after three distinct encores, edging out of the circle until he becomes one of the crowd.

Even without him, the show is diverting, or it would be, if Yennefer were not preoccupied with worry. Strong, she most definitely is, but that doesn’t preclude being, at the moment, scared shitless.

She stays where she is, doesn’t move a minute or an hour later, when her medallion hums with magic. Says, without turning around and with a casual confidence she doesn’t feel, “What are you doing here?”

“I always come here,” Jaskier says. He sounds the same, his voice rich and warm, his vowels soft. He always sounds the same. “I think it might be the only predictable thing in the world, other than music. Students and their art and drinking and thinking they’re going to be the ones to discover something unknown and save all of us, it never really changes.” A moment’s hesitation, brief enough that Yennefer might have imagined it. “Same question for you.”

She shrugs a shoulder. “The place has grown on me.”

She finally looks at Jaskier as he heaves himself up to sit next to her on the edge of the balcony. He looks as young as he did the first time they met, here, still dressed ridiculously, but she’s memorized him quite thoroughly by now: he looks older, the way he carries himself. More wary than she’s accustomed to seeing him.

He’s scanning her too, unabashedly. “Have you… been well?” he asks, obviously making an effort to sound cheerful. Failing miserably – she knows him too well. He’s not hers to know.

“Yes,” Yennefer nods, too eager. “Have you?”

“Yeah.” Jaskier shoves his hands into his pockets, swinging his legs. “Yeah, fantastic, I’m- yeah.”

“Good,” Yennefer says, stupidly, and then their eyes lock for a moment before they both look elsewhere.

She doesn’t know how she convinced herself this was a good idea. He looks well, the way she wanted, and being here next to him, being _home_ next to him, she wants to reach out and touch his face or set her mouth to her favourite spot on his neck or perhaps lace her fingers with his, she wants to ruin _everything_.

She won’t spoil his happiness. Won’t make her sacrifice for nothing. She can be his friend, she _can._ Will. Still – she’s never been good at not being greedy – she has to know. Just for today, one last time.

“How’s Geralt?” she blurts, as Jaskier asks the exact same question, “How’s Geralt?” in the exact same instant.

They blink at each other as the music from down below takes on the sound of something vaguely surreal, fife and drums and raucous, indistinct singing.

“…Why would you ask that?” Jaskier says. Slowly, slowly.

“Why would _you_ ask that?” Yennefer asks back. “You’ve been with him this whole time.”

Jaskier is staring at her as though she’s speaking in tongues, all bashfulness apparently forgotten. “Uh, no, I very much haven’t.”

He’s joking. He must be-

He’s not bloody joking. But how-

“What the fuck, Jaskier?” Yennefer demands, head spinning.

“My sentiments precisely,” Jaskier says, dragging a hand through his hair as his eyes bore into hers, piercing. “You haven’t been with him?”

“No!”

“Right,” Jaskier says, and now – Yennefer does a double take, unused to the expression on his face – he looks something approximating angry as he turns where he sits to face her properly. “Right, sorry, so I exiled myself into literal years of singing sad ballads at shitty taverns so you could be with the man you love and you decided, ‘eh, on second thought, actually fuck that’?”

He’s talking fast, heated, and Yennefer matches him, snaps, “You didn’t leave, _I_ left.”

“Bollocks,” Jaskier says, matter-of-fact, which, yeah, Yennefer’s sentiments precisely. “Why would you- that doesn’t make any sense, why-”

“For you, obviously,” she says, forcefully. “So you could be together, so you could be _happy_.”

It’s Jaskier’s turn, now, to gape at her, hands flailing like he’s reaching for a gesture he can’t find. “What. The. _Fuck_.”

Yennefer squeezes her eyes shut, tries to make her words come out properly without lashing out. “I know.”

“How- what-”

“I know, alright?” she snaps, because obviously not lashing out was a lost cause. “I know that I was selfish to come in between you both, but I was trying not to be, for once, I- my feelings weren’t supposed to be your problem, and I know that it wasn’t fair to act like you were mine-”

“When the hell have I given the impression that I’m not?”

Jaskier’s outburst rings out loud, drowning out the faint music from below, drowning out everything else in the world except for the way he’s sat next to Yennefer, staring at her wide-eyed as though he’s not sure whether to laugh or cry. He throws his hands up, a gesture of surrender. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t yours, for fuck’s sake, I-” His voice nearly breaks as his eyes find hers, helplessly disbelieving. “You must know.”

Yennefer can’t breathe.

It sounds as if he’s saying-

“You said I was breaking your heart,” she tells him, carefully enough that her voice sounds brittle even to her own hearing. She _heard_ him tell her that, sincere as anything.

“Because I thought you were choosing him.”

“I-” Yennefer opens then closes her mouth, completely at a loss. Thinks of years of Jaskier mooning over Geralt while in her arms, of how happy he looked when they were in Geralt’s farmhouse. She saw him, she heard him. “ _You_ were choosing him,” she argues. “You love him.”

Jaskier has been shaking his head as she speaks. “You don’t think I love you too?”

“Not like _that_.”

“Not like-”

For the first time in all the lifetimes she’s known him, Jaskier appears to be utterly at a loss for words. No stammering, no anything, just silence as he gapes at her, seemingly overwhelmed, before getting to his feet.

Yennefer watches, frozen in place, as Jaskier drags a hand through his hair again, scraping it roughly out of his face. He looks genuinely distressed, bubbling over with pent-up energy as he paces the length of the balcony, away from her, then back, then away again before turning on his heel to meet her eyes.

“If you’re toying with me, this is incredibly cruel,” he says, like a warning, like a plea for mercy.

Yennefer doesn’t even move to breathe. She may never grow again. She may be rooted in place. “I’m not toying with you,” she says, honest. “I don’t, with you.”

Jaskier makes this sound, somewhere between an incredulous laugh and a choked sob.

 _Strong_ , Yennefer thinks, _be strong._

“Do you?” she makes herself ask, so quietly she scarcely hears herself. Steady. She can be steady. “Love me? …Like that?”

“You must know,” Jaskier says again, matching her volume. He takes a step closer, then another, so he’s stood in front of her, half-silhouetted against the lights of his city. When he speaks, he does so urgently, fervently.

“I’ve spent most every day of my life writing songs to make you want me around,” he says, then, with a cut-off laugh, “and ruining all of my favourite clothing with blood so you’d let me follow you on your stupidly noble murder spree that you won’t admit is noble, and trying to find someone I could care for enough to make me get over you, you have to know, you _must_ know.” He takes half a step back, as if pushed there by the weight of his own words. “Sorry if I haven’t made it obvious enough, but I’ve been unfathomably fucking in love with you for the better part of a century, Yen, so-”

Yennefer flings herself into his arms so fiercely that they nearly stumble backwards off of the balcony; as is, she hears the small ‘oof’ as Jaskier hits the railing, and her apology disappears before she can vocalize it because his arms come up around her back, gripping handfuls of her dress, clinging precisely as intently as she is to him.

 _Jaskier_ , she thinks, lost entirely in the scent of him, the hummingbird beat of his heart, the soft skin of his neck where she presses her face. He loves her like she loves him, he has always loved her, he’s her best friend, he’s-

“Say you’re mine again,” she implores, breathless, and Jaskier does.

“I’m yours,” he promises, his arms warm, steady, familiar around her. “I’m so, so entirely yours, I bloody worship you, if you’ll have me, if that’s what you want-”

“I do,” Yennefer says, scarcely believing herself as she says it aloud. “I do want you, I’ve wanted-” She breaks off as her voice catches, and she’d be embarrassed but she can’t bring herself to, not right now, and she never has been the gentle type, so she pulls back and hits Jaskier in the chest, hard. “I can’t believe you didn’t say anything for so long, with all the talking you do, you stupid _fuck_.”

Jaskier takes the bait, goes from romantic to bitchy bard in half a second, one hand wound in Yennefer’s hair as he brushes it back from her face. “Oh, no no no _no_ , you didn’t say anything either, if I’m stupid you are absolutely right here with me, witcher girl.”

Yennefer _adores_ him.

“Idiot,” she says.

“Stubborn wretch,” Jaskier says back, and his eyes are the kind of sky that only exists in songs and in him, and Yennefer gets a hand on either side of his face, tugs him in, and kisses him, hard.

She doesn’t mean to be smiling through it, laughing, but she is, and she can feel Jaskier’s lips curved up against hers as well, clumsy and intense and just purely and incandescently _happy_.

Ridiculous. They’re both ridiculous.

Neither of them pulls back when they break off, leaving their foreheads pressed together, their noses brushing. Yennefer can’t wipe the smile off of her face. He loves her, he’s in love with her, he’s finally in her arms again – properly, this time – and she doesn’t want to let go and Jaskier doesn’t ask her to, just stays touching his nose to hers, touching his fingertips to her jaw, her bottom lip, as though he can’t believe she’s real.

Nothing could make the moment any better, the two of them here on top of the world, and even as Yennefer thinks that, _the two of them_ , she remembers-

“Oh, fuck,” Jaskier says. “Geralt.”

\---

Geralt is, somewhat predictably, feeding his horse when they arrive.

“You do the talking,” Jaskier mutters to her as they stride across the field, the dew-damp grass glittering in the sun as it begins to peek over the horizon. It tickles Yennefer’s ankles.

“That would be a first,” she says, and Jaskier rolls his eyes, incredibly long-suffering and equally incredibly overdramatic, considering that she didn’t say a word of a lie. Still, as they approach the stable, Yennefer can understand his nerves. They’ve never much concerned themselves with convention. They’ve never attempted to flout it quite so intimately before either, though.

Yennefer sees the moment that Geralt registers their presence. He sets down his armful of hay, laying a hand on Roach’s neck, silently calming so she won’t startle as Yennefer and Jaskier draw near. He says nothing. Not even a grunt, this time.

He looks good. He always looks good, even when he’s eyeing them both suspiciously. _Fucking humans._ , Yennefer thinks, despairing.

They stop just short of actually entering the paddock.

“In our defense,” Jaskier says by way of greeting, because he’s literally physically incapable of not doing the talking at literally any opportunity, “We each thought that we were nobly sacrificing our romantic inclinations toward you for the other so we wouldn’t have to deal with both of us loving you.”

Geralt raises an eyebrow, dusting off his hands on the knees of his trousers. “Neither of you thought to ask my opinion?”

“Well,” Jaskier starts, then shuts his mouth, a hand on his hip as he turns and looks at Yennefer, apparently at a loss. Typical.

It’s easier, somehow, to be confident when Jaskier needs her to. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand the decision making processes of extremely powerful beings, farm boy,” she tells Geralt, ludicrously haughty on purpose, and knows that she’s succeeded when the corner of his mouth lifts, almost imperceptably, in a smile.

She notices. Knows that Jaskier does too. It’s the kind of thing you notice, when you love somebody.

Geralt lets out a breath, blowing a long strand of hair out of his face. “Fucking witchers and witches,” he grumbles. “Making things complicated.”

“I mean, if we’re being technical, I’m a sorcerer, not a witch, it’s- right, yeah, no, shutting up,” Jaskier reroutes mid-sentence as both Yennefer and Geralt fix him with dry looks.

Yennefer looks at Geralt, after, and he looks at her as well. Amber eyes, eyes Yennefer thinks she was maybe always meant to know.

A dozen unspoken things pass between them, an apology and a forgiving and a _can you bloody believe we’re both utterly gone over someone this loudmouthed_ , and then, sure as anything, the knowledge that what Geralt is to her and what Jaskier is to her are two distinct, singular things, and what she is to either of them is as well, but the three of them together, the way that they’re even now slipping easily into what they were-

It makes sense. This, they all know.

Geralt unhitches the gate of the paddock, lets it swing open. “We three don’t have to be complicated,” he says, matter-of-fact. Honest, the way he’s always been honest. He looks between Yennefer and Jaskier, tilts his head. “This can just be simple, yeah?”

“Oh, you _would_ say that,” Jaskier bursts out, and Yennefer barely gets a second to enjoy Geralt smiling for real, feelings written on his face the way they always have been around Jaskier, before Jaskier is bounding through the open gate, yanking Geralt down by the laces of his shirt, and – _finally, finally –_ kissing him.

Some part of Yennefer was still expecting to feel jealous, at Jaskier’s touch on Geralt or at Geralt’s touch on Jaskier, but they both look so _happy_ when they’re in each other’s arms and when they turn to look at her, beckoning her to join them, and she’s a part of that happiness, and she can’t bring herself to resent it.

“You call that a kiss?” she asks Jaskier, catty on purpose. They’re still them, after all.

He leans back against Geralt, folded smugly into in his arms. “You think you can do better?”

“You know perfectly well I can.”

“Hm,” Jaskier muses as Yennefer steps into the paddock, moves until she’s in front of them. He extends a hand, and Yennefer laces their fingers together, looks up at Geralt, who huffs a laugh, then back at Jaskier.

When Jaskier smiles at her, it is beautiful, blinding, teasing, _loving_. “Prove it.”

And she does.

\---

(Three is more complicated than two, Yennefer always thought.

She doesn’t much mind being wrong, in this one instance.

She and Jaskier come and they go, they kill and they save, and always, like the tide, they return to the farmhouse in the middle of nowhere; and Yennefer teaches and learns and memorizes the way that Geralt rolls his eyes at the trinkets that she and Jaskier bring back to him but keeps every one, the way that she and Geralt can take Jaskier to bed and make him _sob_ he’s so overwhelmed, the way that Jaskier and Geralt are, in a hundred thousand tiny ways, _hers_ , until it feels like home.

Contentment is new to her. A contradiction in terms, in some ways, because Yennefer has always been a creature of desire and she still is.

She won’t be a mother. She passes children when she and Jaskier travel, and her heart still aches, though that begins to dull in time, as well, because she won’t be a mother but she has a family, a pack, like in Jaskier’s song. She wants – of course, she still wants – but she runs her hand along the puffed dandelions in Geralt’s field, sending seeds spiraling off on the breeze, and thinks that even if some things are for wanting and not having, for the first time, this, this life she has, feels like enough.

And then:

Jaskier’s custom, as ever, is to deliver multiple novels’ worth of news each time he returns from teaching, and this most recent instance is no exception. The sound of a portal heralds his arrival, and the three of them fall into bed, then, once they’ve been thoroughly reacquainted with the ways they all fit together, he sets about delivering his usual reports.

He’s playing his lute as he chatters, absently plucking away at one of Yennefer’s favourite of his songs. She mostly listens to the music, letting the hum of his voice and its human gossip wash over her, comforting and warm and missed, even though his parting was short. She tucks her toes under his thigh, seeking contact whatever way she can; her head pillowed against Geralt’s chest while he runs his fingers through the dark strands of her hair. He’d do the same if he saw them white, she thinks. Believes.

“-and there was hardly any wine, either, because so many supply routes have gone to all hell, and- oh, Yen, we were right about Nilfgaard getting worse, they advanced on Cintra and the capital has entirely fallen.”

Yennefer hears the hitch in Geralt’s breath, feels the way he tenses against her, an instinctive reaction. When she cranes her neck to look at his face, he’s pale, staring at Jaskier like he’s just seen a ghost.

“Cintra?” he asks. He never interrupts Jaskier’s stories. “The royals?”

“Cintra didn’t have a witcher and an incredibly handsome sorcerer protecting it,” Jaskier says, comforting, and it makes Yennefer frown, because Geralt isn’t the sort to seek comfort, or to give a rat’s ass about politics, but he still feels tense.

“What is it?” she asks, sitting up and turning so she can look at him, curious, trying not to focus on the sense of foreboding.

Geralt swallows, hard. “You know how I told you I left my village, once,” he says.

“Once,” Yennefer echoes, then, putting it together without comprehending the significance, “You went to Cintra?”

Geralt nods, drags a hand through his hair, roughly.

“Geralt…” Jaskier says, slow. He exchanges a look with Yennefer, and after a silent conversation, _do you know what he’s talking about_ , _no idea,_ they both turn back to him, and Geralt looks distinctly guilty.

“What do you know about the law of surprise?” he asks, and Yennefer thinks of dandelions in a field and a child she isn’t supposed to have, of Queen Calanthe’s grandchild promised to some nobody over a decade ago, of destiny, which isn’t supposed to exist, and everything changes again.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> amal el-mohtar wrote “it is very difficult to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask ‘do I have you still’, when they end a letter with ‘yours’, mean it in any substantive way” which is beautiful but also quietly terrible and evocative of like. love as possession vs love as selflessness, love as a humbling, willingly undertaken, which was a contrast i thought about a lot writing this

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS:   
>  \- canon typical medieval-ish violence   
>  \- POV character mentions a past suicide attempt, her scars are noticed by other characters on two separate occasions   
>  \- mention is made of various minor characters being rapists/abusers, they all die painfully and violently   
>  \- POV narrator also has some generally negative thoughts about self image, referring to herself as ugly/deformed, and some fairly unhealthy possessiveness over her relationships


End file.
